Jane's Journey

On the Road Again

2012-02-14T21:17:00.016-06:00

Tuesday I woke up to find Beaven pouring over maps spread out next to his laptop and a huge smile on his face. We had just received confirmation that our trip to Europe this fall is a “Go.” Our next decision is whether to add an extra two days in Paris at the beginning of the trip to accommodate for jet lag. It wasn’t a very hard decision and we began our day with a flurry of emails to arrange it. It may not have been spending a romantic Valentine’s Day in Paris but it was close enough for me.

I guess you might say that one of our hobbies is travel. We have done a surprisingly lot of it without any kind of grand master plan. We often see a scene in a movie where the heroine is racing down an avenue in Rome or a couple strolling a familiar cobblestone street and find ourselves saying “We’ve been there.”

You can read all you want about a place but until you set your body in it you don’t have the full experience. We’ve stood atop a clear blue-green glacier in Alaska and hiked the Appalachian Trail (OK, just a few feet of it.) In November of 2001 we passed the still-smoldering mountain of rubble in New York City on a trip that had been confirmed on September 10th. We’ve toured Windsor Castle where, as perfect as the restoration was, I could tell the difference between the burned part of the castle and the untouched part. The recently rebuilt floor still squeaked while the original floor did not . This is the worth of being in a place: the best photography will never be able to tell you what actually standing in a place can. Pictures didn’t tell you what the World Trade Center smelled like after the towers fell. You had to be there in person.

We know a great cafeteria in London so far below the radar that we’re usually the only Americans there. I’ve been lost in the Uffizi galleries twice looking for Botticelli’s iconic painting of the naked chick standing on a clamshell. I think the people who actually understand art call it the Birth of Venus while I know it as the painting that is two right turns after the row of statues. Or something like that. If I could remember these details I wouldn’t need to take an hour to find the one painting. But it’s gorgeous and huge and I love to just stand and look at it. It’s kind of like seeing Van Gough’s Starry Night at the MoMA in New York. You have to see it in all three dimensions for it to count. You just have to be there.

Just like you don’t go to church just once in your life in order to have a relationship with God, travel to a place is something you need to do more than once to get the full experience. I feel the same way about a few sculptures and paintings as well as gelato.

We’ve done a lot of the standard things two or three times, which is when you start feeling an ownership of the experience. This trip will be my third time to see Michelangelo’s David. And I plan to savor every minute of our time together. David and I are close friends and I don’t expect I will ever tire of spending time with him. One year they had taped a motion sensor to his butt to check the effects of the traffic on the sculpture. I have seen David at his most vulnerable and still find him captivating. Real love is like that.

I’ve perfected the art of taking a picture without museum officials knowing what I’m doing. The only hard part is when Elizabeth starts hissing at me, “Mom, what are you doing? You can’t take pictures in here! It’s against the rules!” She is very distracting when she does that. The key is remembering to make triple-dog-sure your flash is turned off. Then you can hold the camera loosely by your side and snap the picture. You may not get it framed perfectly but you can always crop it to suit yourself later. It doesn’t hurt anything and no one is the wiser. It’s the other damned tourists with their flashes going off all over the place that disrupts things and probably damages the artwork. I have a great shot of the Sistine Chapel ceiling using this technique. And, of course, David.

Probably the most exotic place we’ve been was the black sand beach of Montericco, Guatemala where we found ourselves just as broke as the only ATM in town was. When we checked in we found out you had to pay extra to have the air-conditioning turned on in our room. We could pay to sleep confortably or to eat that weekend but we couldn’t afford both. We simply didn’t have the money; nobody took credit cards and the only ATM in town was broken. It was hot and humid and I had a headache. It was a very sobering position to be in. We finally reminded ourselves that we could probably live for a month just on stored fat alone and chose the air-conditioning. Once the decision was made we miraculously found enough quetzals to pay for two hamburguesas. That’s about as hardcore as our travel has ever been.

In exchange for the sparse living conditions of Montericco we were treated to one of the few untouched beaches left on earth. You could stand at the edge of the water and look out at the sea and see absolutely nothing man-made. There were no ships anchored off-shore and no oil rigs in the distance. You could look out at the water and see the horizon exactly as God left it on the morning of creation. There are not many places like that left on the planet.

We try to get to the meat of a place when we travel. We don’t just drive by the Eiffel Tower in a cab. We get subway passes and travel as temporary locals, as our travel mentor, Rick Steves, has trained us. Many times we have been part of the afternoon or morning work commute as people sat reading or listening to their iPods. We became part of their culture not mere observers. Beaven understands the tube system in London so well that the locals will occasionally ask him for directions. And, here’s the cool part: he always knows the answer. It’s fun to watch their faces when they hear his answer delivered in a Texas accent. You can tell they’re wondering if should they trust this hayseed from America. But he’s so confident in his answer that they usually head in the direction he sends them.

I’ve even had the “complete experience” of having my pocket picked in Pisa. Luckily, just as we were leaving our house we both emptied our wallets onto the copier and made copies of the front and back of all our cards and documents. Canceling the credit cards was a breeze back in our hotel room. Beaven even seemed a little too happy to cancel my Visa card. It taught me a valuable lesson first-hand and made me feel like a real veteran. It didn’t however keep me from having my camera stolen a couple of years later in Guatemala. That day my mistake was in taking flash photos in a crowd then putting the camera in a huge pocket of my bright blue Columbia jacket. The only thing missing below the bill of my bright pink ball cap was a neon sign on my forehead that flashed out: “Stupid Gringa here with big pockets.”

Sometimes I have to remind Beaven to slow down when we travel. His impulse is to see as much as he can in the time allotted. One year I rebelled against his “Sherman marches to the sea” style of tourism. We were on our way to tour yet another Roman site in England and found the entrance to it a little past a small square where a guitarist was playing for a lunchtime crowd of locals eating sandwiches. I sat on a bench to listen to the guitar and enjoy the beautiful, relaxing weather. He sat patiently for a few minutes then announced that he “didn’t come 5,000 miles to sit on a bench all day.” Well, I did. So we split up and each had our own version of a wonderful time.

Now that the basic arrangements for our trip in September have been made we can sit back and monitor the value of the dollar. We’ll download the latest subway map of Paris and practice our favorite phrases like “Je voudrais chocolate negro” and “Coca light, s’il vous plait.” I’m counting the days until I can visit my favorite market in Florence and get a mozzarella caprese sandwich to take on a hike to the café overlooking the city. Hang tight, Dave I’m on my way.

Sabbath

2012-02-08T12:34:00.007-06:00

I’ve been trying to decide whether I want to talk about chickens today or Sabbath. We got a couple of chickens last week. Our neighbors had fallen out of love with their chickens when they stopped laying and they’ve decided to start over with a new flock this spring. So they gave us a couple of chickens to practice on. We named them after our mothers. If you remember Blanche from last week’s blog you will not be surprised that the chicken named for her quite literally flew the coop and walked back home to her peeps, her head bobbing in rhythm to her feet as she scurried home. We knew it was pointless to try to catch her.

Lois

Lois stayed three or four days until she did the same. We had them just long enough to know that, yes, we would like a flock of chickens. But we still have some work to do before we can get serious. Secure housing will be first on our list.

Alas, they didn’t stay long enough to provide me with enough fodder for a blog. Something related to the chickens did, however. During the process of adopting the chickens we had such a wonderful weekend that I experienced a Sabbath. A real live Sabbath. And, yes, in spite of attending worship on a regular basis for the majority of my long life, I don’t experience a true Sabbath very often. But I am gaining the ability to recognize one when I find it.

In the midst of becoming chicken owners we had one of the best weekends of my life. Emily and both granddaughters were here for the weekend. The weather was wonderful and everyone played outside all day long Saturday. The neighbor brought his car over to our house to work on it and it was a joy to watch him teach his son how to do some things. He patiently explained the purpose of the parts he was replacing. He would get the nut started on the bolt then let Nathan finish tightening it. We had about eight kids at various times in our backyard or out in the field. We have plenty of room so nobody got in anyone’s way. Sometimes the nine goats followed the kids over. Some of the goats are pregnant and ready to deliver any time now so they are rather slow and waddle when they walk. And one of them is still just a baby. I haven’t learned all their names yet but the baby would periodically jump straight up like springs were attached to her feet.

It was one of those glorious days where the air was crammed full of innocence and possibilities. The thought came to me: “This what ‘re-creation’ means.” I understood why we gave the word ‘recreation’ to the process of enjoying oneself. That night I felt refreshed as though this was what I was created for in the first place. Could it be that one of the reasons I was put on this earth was to embrace and enjoy the air, the clouds and the fellow humans God gave me?

I have a bunch of books on the Sabbath. Some of them I’ve even read. (Yes, I thought that might impress you.) I have read that God gave humanity a command to rest on a regular basis not only to recharge our batteries but also to play with God. And it was a command not an option. Just as we are constricted by a commandment to not kill or steal, we are unbound by a command to enjoy ourselves by spending the day with our Creator.

The idea of playing with God appeals to me. My Jewish friend, Nancy, spends the whole Sabbath with her family just goofing off. They devote the entire day to family. They play games, read, watch some videos and take long naps. They spend time enjoying each other, sometimes never changing out of their pajamas. It’s not a chore of what the day forbids but a feast of what the day brings.

The mild weather we’ve had lately has enabled me to spend a lot of time outdoors this winter. It has been so nice outside that I’ve wondered if it might be a sin to neglect time outdoors. This weather has been a gift from God and to ignore the fresh green grass and clear blue sky is just ungrateful. For me, spending time outdoors with neighbors was an act of worship and thanksgiving as much as being inside any church sanctuary..

The same weekend the kids came over I was clearing brush in the northern most section of our land. I spent some time by one of our oldest trees. It died a couple of years ago, presumably of old age and only the stump remains. It sits on the edge of a stand of oaks. It sat there untouched all this time. Vines had grown over it and new trees sprouted in the sun that emerged when the tree’s shade disappeared. The ground beneath it has composted with years of old dead leaves and rotting limbs that have fallen as the tree died. As I cleared out the vines I found some of the cleanest, most fragrant, light, nutritious soil I’ve seen in a long time--soil so clean that you could almost eat it. I longed to dig in it up to my elbows.

I delighted in the soil. It wasn’t merely dirt. It was a re-creation of something old that God had taken and processed into a new life. I wanted to take it all and put it into my garden or maybe take my seeds and plant something there under the tree stump. It was life-affirming soil.

I walked the labyrinth on Monday. The ground was dry enough that I set my iPhone on the ground in the center and listened to music while I walked. I had a couple of questions for God and a few complaints. We didn’t get anything resolved between us but I felt “listened to” and loved.

Lately I’ve missed God. I have been forgetting to take God with me as I wander through the week. I sometimes fall into a trap of going to church without much thought. I accidentally leave God at home -- in the trees calling to the pine needles as God’s breath rubs the needles together making a soft sound, calling through the wind. Calling me, urging me to come, come and see what God has made.

I am glad to have caught myself so I can turn around and catch up with my Creator.

!@#$%^&*!!!

2012-01-31T21:06:00.015-06:00

Today, I want to talk about profanity. So, if you think you’re gonna get your panties all in a wad over a few curse words just skip me over today. While I try to tone down my own use of profanity, I do appreciate a few well-placed cuss words, especially if done in a clever and intelligent way.

I have gotten out of the habit of cursing very much because I’m a grandmother as well as a church youth leader. There’s usually someone around that I have act mature in front of. It’s a burden that I’ve gotten so used to that I don’t even notice it. We just don’t cuss in our family. Beaven thinks it’s unattractive and I usually agree with him.

OK, maybe I do say “shit” a lot. OK, maybe “hell” and “damn” but I swear I don’t swear much in front of the grands. Well, if I do I usually apologize. At least I apologize if their mother is looking. Actually, she usually apologizes for me.

My father never cursed because he called it a sign of a poor vocabulary. I only heard Daddy cuss twice in my life- once was while putting the lights on the Christmas tree and the second time was when his Styrofoam cup of coffee turned over one windy morning on a camping trip. Both times we only heard a soft and mild “damn.” Just these two memorable examples tells you I was raised better.

And even though I don’t get into hard-core cussing very often I have long held a theory that the term “God Damn It” is actually a prayer of intercession. Most people call it taking the Lord’s name in vain but I haven’t figured where the vanity part comes in.

Well, I went to see Lewis Black in Fort Worth last week. He is one of the funniest humans on earth in my opinion but part of the humor is that he will build up a frustrating scenario then let loose with violent shaking and a string of profanity that totally fits the situation and leaves you wishing you could do the same without the PTA on your doorstep with a warrant for your arrest.

Lewis Black takes profanity to a level that I think might impress my father. Daddy’s objection was that it was a sign of poor language skills if you couldn’t think of a better word. He called it lazy language. But Lewis Black’s use of profanity isn’t lazy--he works hard at his profanity. Shouting with outrage about some ludicrous government move or frustrating stint in telephone hell, we will wave his arms, waggle his head and cheeks then wag his fingers; then ultimately, after exhausting all his muscle groups, point both of his fingers and do little push-ups with his finger tips and finally tear off his glasses and bury his face in his hands. The curse words accompanying all this begin with minor profanity you might hear in the back alley of high school then build up to Marine Corps boot camp level and after building them a bit more, finally end with some he has made up himself after running out of words.

Friday night, I expected him to hone into the Republican debates with a laser beam but instead he mostly talked about the frustrations of modern electronics versus the ones we grew up with. When the television set had four channels and you had to stand up and walk ten feet to change the channel as opposed to a remote control with 4,000 channels with no discernible content. Then he got into texting and facebook—where you can have 4,000 friends none of which you actually know and half of which live in “fucking India.’

Sometimes he got so carried away that the words didn’t actually make sense. He would go on and on until with the last remnant of breath, he would add one profanity he seemingly made up right there on the spot as a sort of period to the sentence. One memorable diatribe ended by calling someone an “ass kissing, butt kicking, fart licking, son of a bitch.” Huh? Fart licking?

It brought back to mind my dear departed mother-in-law. Even though she was no Lewis Black, she could, if the mood struck her, drink like a sailor and cuss like a truck driver. Blanche was a woman of some substance who has been appreciated much more fondly in death than she ever was in life. She was a strong woman best kept at a safe distance.

It embarrassed Beaven without fail because your mother isn’t supposed to cuss. Yet she was the one to wash Beaven’s mouth out with soap if he tried it as a little boy. He claims that even today if he says a certain word he can taste Tabasco sauce.

My daughter describes her as “about 4 foot tall weighing less than 90 pounds and the scariest person on the planet.” She went into the hospital once for a bleeding ulcer and when the nurse tried to broach the subject that she seemed tense she unloaded on the poor lady with one of her category-four tirades. If Hurricane Katrina was a category four storm, so was Blanche.

Her use of colorful language wasn’t constant. I don’t want you to think she did it all the time. She mostly saved it for when she was reading the newspaper in the morning. After a couple of cigarettes and a pot of coffee she could get riled up and it was Katy Bar the Door.

Her crowning achievement in cursing and displaced logic came one morning when she read an account of Gov Ann Richards describing a rival by using a common profanity. I can’t really remember the cuss word the governor used. But I do remember Blanche’s response. With physical rage rivaling Lewis Black tensing her small frame, she slamed her fist on the table and exploded with: “that God-damned Foul Mouthed Bitch!”

And I’m sitting directly across the kitchen table from her thinking, “Do not laugh, Jane. Oh, dear Jesus, DonotlaughDonotlaughDonotlaugh, whatever you do, for God’s sake, do not laugh.” I managed to pull myself out of the moment by imagining dead puppies or something equally tragic and survived the encounter. But it remains one of Blanche’s most memorable moments.

I Believe

2012-01-24T17:57:00.007-06:00

The only word to describe it is a “miracle.” I was breezing along typing out this blog when it happened. Well, I wasn’t breezing along. Truthfully, I was slogging—none too inspired but putting the words down in good faith. My reason for keeping this weekly schedule is to train myself to provide a fertile place for the words to come. Well, today the words came and they are good enough so I will leave them here for you. The true message came out of nowhere just as I was finishing. And it wasn't words. It was a picture.

Let me show you what I wrote. Just go ahead and read the blog. We'll come back to this later. Go on.

I’ve taught a lot of confirmation classes and always enjoy watching young people develop their faith. We have great curricula and teachers and statements and creeds and culture and history and I could go on and on, yada, yada, yada.

But Faith is sneaky. You can state it but you can’t learn it. You can’t go order one by sizes or shapes or colors. You can’t say, ”Oh, I’ll have what my parents have.” About all you can do is watch it unfold. Sister Helen Prejean said “the only way I know what I really believe is by keeping watch on what I do.” So you can only see it in action. It never sits still and it is never definite. At most it’s only a shadowy feeling in your gut. By definition it is not absolute; if it was then it wouldn’t be called “faith”, would it?

Hebrews 11 says that faith is believing something even when you can’t prove it. There’s no test to make sure God is there. It there were such a test and God humored us by “passing” the test then it would stop being faith and become a boring case of cause and effect.

And we come to my subject for today. Belief only applies to the person believing it.

I go back to a lunch I shared years ago with four friends. Two were Presbyterian, one Episcopalian, one Lutheran and one Jewish. The four Christians got into a conversation over whether or not the Jew would get to heaven. And I’m a bit embarrassed to say we did this right in front of Nancy. We examined the issue up one side and down the other. We were desperately trying to find a way to spend eternity with our friend. I don’t think we were worried that she would rot in the fires of Hades—our brains couldn’t grasp the logic of that one; we knew Nancy too well and knew she didn’t deserve eternal damnation any more than any of us. But I think we did worry a bit that there wasn’t a Jewish section of our Christian Heaven. And we wanted our parties to be eternal. They just wouldn’t be the same without Nancy. After all, she was the one who got us tickets to the Dixie Chicks concert. (Yes, this was a long time ago.) We kind of owed her one for that.

Only later did it settle on me what a massive lapse of grace it was to have the conversation right in front of Nancy. What an egotistical array of self-centeredness to assign ourselves a place in heaven based only on our own beliefs.

But Nancy was only a bit bemused by the conversation. She wasn’t nervous or even offended. Our beliefs had no effect on her life or even her after-life. It was very much like how I would act if Nancy told me I really, really needed to follow a Kosher diet. That’s when I came to realize that beliefs aren’t laws.

We can legislate them into our society. We could pass a law permitting the Ten Commandments be allowed to be displayed in courthouses. We could even outlaw a religion we didn’t accept. I think Hitler already did that one. You could force people to stand with their hands over their hearts and profess a love for a government but you can’t force people to actually feel that love or think a certain way on any subject.

I’m afraid if I had been Jewish under Hitler I would have converted to whatever religion he approved of if doing so would save my skin. It would not have changed my relationship with God at all. I would not have looked noble but I would have been alive. And I would have been more than willing to trust any possible hypocrisy to the God of Psalm 139.

It’s been witnessed many times—the government outlaws religion and the people hide the bibles under the beds. Marj Carpenter wrote that when China allowed Christianity to be openly exercised people brought out stacks and stacks of bibles and hymn books they had been hiding for 25 years. When the Spanish conquered the Americas and forced Christianity on the indigenous people they continued to celebrate their Mayan beliefs anyway.

What is in my heart and my head are hidden from the world. I can choose to take them out and play with them, parading up the aisle at church in full view or I can whisper to them as I’m falling asleep at night. I can carry them inside me wherever I go and no one will know the difference. Martyrdom is a lofty goal, it can get you a great reputation but it also has a lot of drawbacks. It ends things. Beliefs carried in secret are sneaky—they survive for another day.

OK. Here’s the miracle. Remember that part? Usually when I get to the end of a blog somehow the words magically fall into place and give me an ending. As I was typing that last paragraph my cell phone beeped that I had a message.

I am not making this up. This message had no “sender.” That’s what is so spooky. And given the exact time I received it I figure this is how God wants me to end today’s blog. Here is the message. Use it how you please.

Fluffing Out

2012-01-17T15:17:00.052-06:00

I had my wedding dress embalmed back in 1969. I’m not sure what they did to preserve it. I seriously doubt embalming fluid was involved but I think it was either washed or sprayed with something to keep it from yellowing. Then they stuffed it with tissue paper to hold the shape. Then they boxed it up into about three boxes like those Russian dolls. I ended up with a box so huge that the only place I could store it was under the bed. This thing was packaged to withstand a nuclear blast.

The first time I took it out for a stroll down memory lane was when Elizabeth was about 6 years old. I’m not sure what the occasion was—probably nothing more than the boredom of a housewife with a small child. It doesn’t take much to entertain people like that.

I got the big brown corrugated box out from under the bed. Inside was a stiff white box. And inside that was a gold box with a flap that you could open to reveal the dress behind a clear plastic window. I took out the stiff white cardboard box to reveal the glittering gold box with the window. I opened the gold flap to show the dress in all its glory. I sat back and waited for my child to behold her mother’s wedding dress. She gasped, “Wow!” I glowed in happiness that she was impressed with this family heirloom. Reality in the form of a six-year old child stepped in: “ What a NEAT box!”

The dress went back inside the magic boxes for another few years.

The next time I got it out was when Emily was 14. We were having some family event and all the uncles and grandparents were here. This time I decided to pull out the tissue paper and try the dress on

First, you need to know that in the late 60’s a lot of wedding dresses had an empire waistline that drew in just below the bustline and above the natural waistline. This was because in the late 60’s a lot of brides were….how shall I say this?....”overachievers” I guess might be a good word. They had already started on their family a little bit in advance of their wedding. In the 60’s this was an embarrassment that we seldom see nowadays. At any rate, it created a market for dresses that accommodated this little detail. Thus was born the empire waistline wedding dress.

That’s not the reason I got a dress with an empire waistline but it sure did make a difference in my ability to get into the dress 20 years later. No way, Jose, would I have gotten into that dress if I had to have the waistline I had on my wedding day. I waved bye-bye to that waistline after the first baby.

Recently, a couple of my friends were talking about clothes sizes. One lady is at least 20 years older than me and the other friend is only nine days older than me. And these chicks claimed they can still get into clothes they wore in high school.

Please.

I would be ecstatic if I ever managed to lose down to what I weighed when I was nine months pregnant. I would probably give a party. And serve lots of desserts, too.

There are three stages to a woman’s weight. Her “normal” weight which is the one she always dreams of going back to. Maybe what she weighed in high school. The next phase is what I call “fluffing out” which you hit around 45 or 50. Like a bird fluffing her wings, everything everywhere is just a tiny bit bigger than before. But then around 55 you start “melting“ and everything goes south. The fluffiness doesn’t go anywhere, it just loosens on your frame and hangs there.

I was in the fluffing out stage the night I decided I’d try the dress on. With the empire waistline I didn’t have to worry about my middle-aged middle so much but the dress still had to cover a woman who had fluffed out in every single other way a person can fluff out. My neck, arms, ribcage were all just a few centimeters more than 20 years ago. I could barely get into the dress but I did and all that was left was to zip the damned thing.

So close yet so far. There was about a three inch gap the zipper would have to cover. Various family members tried their hand at getting the zipper to do its job. I think Beaven even got out a pair of pliers. His approach always involves tools. I’m sure if he had access to power tools that afternoon he would have tried them.

By this time the entire family was laughing at my attempts to get the dress zipped. And this is what I claim was the main culprit. I was laughing so hard that my chest kept expanding and deflating with each laugh. There was no way we could have zipped that dress with me laughing so hard.

We let Emily try it on and it fit my 14 year-old daughter perfectly. Proving that at least at one point in my life I had the body of a fourteen year old.

We took pictures but I’m not sure where they are. Fast forward about 10 years to the year both of my daughters got married within five months of each other. Wedding dresses passed before my eyes at lightning speed that year. (And by this time brides didn't worry about being pregnant when they get married. No...nowadays they wait until after the baby comes and then have the fancy wedding and dress.) About the only dress that registered with me that year was when Elizabeth walked out of the dressing room to show me THE dress and I surprised myself with tears.

Five months later when Emily brought her wedding dress home and her sister tried on her Matron of Honor dress I decided it was time to try my own dress on again. And this time I was going to get that sucker zipped if it hair-lipped Hades. I didn’t care if we tore out all the seams, I just wanted that zipper to close.

Things got serious. No laughing this time, I ordered. I exhaled all the air I could get out of my ribcage. “Zip!” I ordered them with my last puff of air. And between the two of them we managed to get that dressed zipped over my middle-aged body. All the way up to the end of the high collar. Victory.

I couldn’t breathe to speak of—only small shallow breaths. I couldn’t lower my arms to my sides. I couldn’t move my head. “Quick! Get the camera!” I whispered. I wanted the moment documented. I knew there was no way on earth I would ever get inside that dress again.

This is one of my favorite photos. It was one of the best days of my life and it had nothing to do with getting the dress zipped and everything to do with sharing that moment with Elizabeth and Emily.

The Birds are Back

2012-01-11T06:55:00.006-06:00

Monday night was a cold, rainy evening and Beaven had started another one of his Spanish classes. He really likes this one because there’s homework involved and he’s really weird that way. So he’s sitting at the kitchen table doing his homework. We have the TV off so the sounds of the house this evening are the gentle hum of my laptop, the soft Spanish mumbles at the kitchen table and the sound of rain outside the dark window. It was a peaceful evening.

Then Fannie Flamingo showed up. She brought me a photo she took through the window at the church.

Then she started screaming and yelling something about Flamingo Abuse and threatening to turn the church into the Flamingo Freedom Fighters. Whenever Fannie gets worked up like this there are always feathers flying all over the place. She made the FFF sound pretty intimidating.

The birds are left over from the last youth fundraiser. I thought they would be auctioned off when their services were no longer needed and they could go on with their lives with jobs and homes just like the rest of us. That’s what all the other flocks have done.

I first met the Flamingo Family about 14 years ago, the first year they were used as fund raising for the church youth. The way the deal works is that the church youth get about 24 plastic flamingo lawn ornaments and put them in church members’ front yards. They’re arranged in flocks of five or six birds. If a flock shows up in your yard you can get rid of them by paying the youth to come pick them up. They also sell insurance for a fee but you can still get them in your yard if someone is willing to pay more money than the insurance you purchased.

That’s about it. Pretty simple. The kids always make a bunch of money and everyone has fun. (Except Linda Peavy who thinks they look tacky and always buys insurance but ends up with a flock anyway because I’m always willing to pay the kids more money to send the birds anyway just to irritate her. I love Linda like a sister that way.)

Fannie was the leader of the flock that appeared in my front yard and I had a fine time getting to know the flock. Frank was a great help around the house. Fern and Farfel pretty much stayed outside in the garden. Fred mostly watched TV. He liked Jerry Springer and Judge Judy. Francine kept busy re-decorating my house and cleaning. But there was the day Fred and Francine got into an argument while he was watching Jerry Springer on the TV and stuffed one of Francine’s legs down her throat. And when Fred invited a whole flock of grackles to watch the Super Bowl at our house I had to set some house rules. Fannie eventually got a job passing out free samples at Sam’s. But she got fired because she started inviting all the homeless people to stop by for a sample.

The church ended up with about four different flocks and before the project was over I had names for all 24 birds. They auctioned the birds off and some people still have theirs. I used to see Flobella and Faith around town sometimes.

I ended up taking Fannie with me to Guatemala in 1999 but when I wasn’t watching she was kidnapped. I didn’t hear from her for a long time. She eventually showed up at the Betty Ford Clinic with a tattoo under her left wing that read “Free Elian Gonzales” and no memory of anything else.

She was in New York City on September 11th and led everyone across the Brooklyn Bridge because her bright pink feathers were so easy to spot in the gray dust. She got a nice plaque from Mayor Guiliani who has been her good friend ever since. He put her in charge of the Pigeon Relocation Project to find homes for the pigeons who lost their homes that day. So she did a lot of travelling to the big cities all over the world. in search of tall buildings. In the process she met a bald eagle who lives atop the Washington Monument. He wanted to settle down which I thought was a great idea because Sam was eligible for early retirement and a hefty pension but Fannie finally decided she wasn’t meant for the domestic life.

In London she protested the prohibition against feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square and chained herself to the statue of Lord Nelson and started throwing bird seed. She was in Tokyo taking a geisha class when the earthquake and tsumani hit. As soon as she heard she flew into action without even taking her geisha makeup off. She eventually solved the problems with the nuclear reactors by organizing a billion pigeons to fly over and seal the reactors with pigeon poop.

When Fannie heard about these poor left-over flamingos literally stuffed into a drab brown box and left on top a bookshelf she flew into town and has been pestering me ever since to bring them home to my house and find new homes. She is having her sister, Fernie, come cook a great Welcome Home meal for them. Fernie arrived last night straight from catering a New Hampshire victory banquet for Rick Perry. She said there were very few people at the party so she left early.

It was nice to see the sisters together. Fernie has been working the state fair circuit since her husband Falafel was killed in a tragic woodworking accident. He got his wing caught in a Delta floor-mounted planer and nothing was left of him but a pile of feathers. Fernie runs the funnel cake stand at the Texas State Fair where fried foods are her specialty. The only problem with having Fernie visit is all the grease and powdered sugar in the kitchen.

I sent Beaven to Garland yesterday to get them and bring them home. He is in the dog house with the flock from the start because he referred to them as “penguins.” Then they started fighting so he put their box in the trunk of the car.

As soon as he got home I realized what the fuss was all about. Somehow an older flock had gotten mixed in with this year’s birds. Or maybe they just came home to roost. But there were the flock from 2004: Wesley, Calvin, Luther, Ronnie Gene, and Betty Sue. That flock always had problems getting along. They get into loud theological arguments over Faith vs Works at the end of which Betty Sue usually slugs someone with her bible. She packs a pretty mean wallop because it’s in one of those quilted cases with a handle. When she winds up and delivers it’s a real live gol-durned Come to Jesus meeting right there.

But that left the new flock and I had never met them. They’re pretty cowed right now but it did get them to tell me their names: Phillip, Phyllis, Phoebe, Philemon and Philbert. They all met each other in pharmacy school. So the problem of finding them jobs seems solved.

Fannie insists that I find homes for the birds.

So, here’s the deal: To adopt one of these birds, make a donation to the youth by writing out a check payable to FPC Garland. Give it to me on Sunday or mail it to my house. Don't give it to Pepa-she is busy this Sunday and... well, this activity hasn't actually been approved yet--(as of 6 am Wed morning. But I have high hopes.). If any hands get dirty they should be mind. Lord knows, I will have shoveled a ton of flamingo poop by Sunday.

Specify which bird you want. I only have the ten so it's first come, first served. I will do a background check to make sure you have room in your house and can provide transportation if they need it. Usually they fly to work, though. But they’ll need an initial bird seed supply until they get their first paycheck.

Service Break

2012-01-03T20:31:00.008-06:00

About three years ago I noticed what a long break the college kids get at Christmas. They end up with almost a month and that's just AFTER Christmas. “What on earth do they do with all that time?” is what I wanted to know. I decided they needed something to keep them busy and thus was born the idea of Service Break.

We would take the week between Christmas and New Years and run around town doing service projects. We would visit a few well established service opportunities as well as some odd jobs for folks in our church. I pictured our college kids painting or repairing stuff for the elderly and patted myself on the back at what a great match of talents and needs I had discovered.

It turned out I was wrong but only slightly.

The college kids were all either taking a Jan-term class, visiting out of town relatives or didn't want to do a damned thing but sleep and let their brains regenerate. The elderly didn't need any help, either, they said, Thank You Very Much. I started thinking I had discovered neither talent nor needs. So I cleaned off my glasses and went with what we did have—an assortment of restless retired folks and a handful of enthusiastic elementary and junior high school kids. Then I matched us up with a couple of well-organized volunteer organizations. We pared the week down to three days of mostly half-day work. And told people they were free to come for just one day or all three if they wanted.

All three days our first order of business was to serve coffee to the Day Labor Center. This is a street corner where the City of Garland built a pavilion with bench seats where the guys looking for work can assemble out of the rain and offer themselves for odd jobs. Until the city intervened these guys were standing in the parking lots of various businesses wearing down the grass and it was not organized in any way to help anyone, laborers or employers alike.

Most of the guys are Mexicans and only a few are either black or white. I’m not sure if the Mexicans are legal or not. I don't like to get all wadded up with a lot of questions. I also don't know why they are predominantly Mexican but the city employs a couple of guys to manage the center and they are fluent in Spanish.

Please let me interject here and clarify that I use the word "Mexican" in a respectful way as in "someone born in Mexico or who has roots in that country." I'm afraid the majority of our culture today has fallen into sloppy thinking and assumes the word is a pejorative when it really isn't. Most people from Mexico are proud to have their roots in that country and be called Mexican. It’s the WASPs who think it's an insult, possibly inventing an insult where none existed before. We're clever that way sometimes.

Anyway, this is the easiest of our projects. We set up the church's biggest coffeemaker the night before with a timer to have the coffee ready for 8 a.m. We really should start at 6 or 7 because I’m sure most of the men are looking for work then. But the idea of asking a volunteer to start work at 6 a.m. kind of takes the fun out of it. Eight a.m. is a good compromise and I tell myself that if a guy has found work before we get there with the coffee then he is lucky and doesn't really need it. The ones who need it are the ones still waiting at 8 a.m. because they're facing a long, dry day.

With the coffee ready all we have to do is pour it all into a five-gallon cooler and take it to the center. The kids have done this job long enough that they know the drill and fall out of the car ready to serve up steaming styrofoams of coffee with a smile. "Gracias", the guys say. "De Nada," our kids say.

Tuesday, after coffee we did a once- a-year deep cleaning of the church sanctuary. We wiped down the pews, vacuumed between the cushions and replaced all the pencils with freshly sharpened ones. We are the only group in our congregation who know exactly how many pencil-holders we have--306. It’s amazing how much dirt can accumulate in a room that is basically used only 52 times a year by people who have just taken a bath. Because Presbyterians tend to sit in the exact same spot every single week we know who the messy people are, who hasn’t washed their hands and who steals the pencils.

After cleaning the sanctuary we went to the North Texas Food Bank to box up food. The previous years we had assembled bags of food for a program known as Food 4 Kids. These bags go into a backpack on Friday afternoon for the kids in the free breakfast and lunch program. Some of them might not have any food over the weekend otherwise. It’s easy to pack these bags because you have one person by each box and if you’re a juice person when the bag is passed to you your only job is to put two boxes of juice into the bag, passing the bag along to the milk person. It’s an easy breezy assembly line.

But this year we did what they call “salvage.” This is where we had massive crates of an assortment of food—sometimes from canned food drives and sometimes from grocery stores who might empty an entire shelf of overstocked items. This was a much tougher job than the Food 4 Kids packing because you had to make decisions. There were about four different things you could do with a can once you picked it up: was it water or a drink? (water went into one crate while there was another crate for anything else you can drink) was it mostly sugar? Sugar went into a box of its own, vegetables or meat went into Family boxes. But, first, you had to check to see if it was out of date and needed to go into still another crate for trash. There was another box for non-food items and one for pet food.

We found this packing a lot harder because there were so many variables. However, at the end of our shift, Chris, the NTFB guy helping us, told us we had boxed up 4 pallets of food providing over 4,000 meals for people facing food insecurity. Not bad for three hour’s work.

After we had been there about an hour I looked over at one of the other areas and saw a bunch of big guys in Dallas Cowboys shirts packing up food. We started out thinking it was just a bunch of really devoted fans doing a good deed spurred by leftover Christmas spirit. But then we saw the television cameras and we knew these guys had to be the real thing. One of the kids asked Chris if this was the REAL Cowboys and he said they come about three or four times a year and stay only as long as the photo op lasted. Sure enough, fifteen minutes later the cameras disappeared and so did the football players. We stayed for the balance of our three hour shift and took some pictures ourselves.

Wednesday we went to one of the most unique projects we’ve ever done--a project the volunteer coordinator always warns us “not everyone understands.” The largest homeless shelter in Dallas is run by the First Presbyterian Church. At the start of the Christmas season they put out a general request for shoe boxes filled with toiletries for the homeless and include a general suggestion list. And they ask that these be wrapped in Christmas wrapping paper. Over the years the response has grown via forwarded emails and they get more and more boxes. After distributing 2,000 of these boxes to the homeless this year they still had another couple of thousand boxes left over. It amounts to almost their entire need for the rest of the year and they are grateful for the boxes; it saves them from having to buy these goods themselves and relieves a huge cash drain on their budget. But here is the challenge: They don’t have storage space for 2,000 shoe boxes wrapped in Christmas paper.

Our job was to take the wrapped boxes apart and re-package the contents into big tubs of like items. One for Chapsticks One for toothbrushes one for hand sanitizers.

They told us it was painful for them to order the dismantling of these beautifully wrapped boxes and the volunteer coordinator begged for an alternative idea if we had one. About the only consolation was that the shoe boxes and paper would be recycled. We had to take the boxes apart so they could be squished flat and more would fit into the recycling bin. I worked at this job until my hands wore out and I switched to sorting. It turns out that taking apart a shoe box is a tough job. I became a connoisseur of shoe boxes, partial to the ones that were assembled without glue and could be taken apart easily.

Thursday was our last day and we baked several dozen cookies for a nursing home where one of our congregation lives then took the cookies to the residents and visited a while with Sherrie.

You may remember that I have written of Sherrie before. Her condition has progressed to where she needs round the clock care now. But she retains her sense of humor, especially when we told her we found out her real age. She still has remnants of her bright smile and the little wink she gives to show she knows what’s going on and we’re not fooling her. A good time was had by all.

Thank you, God, for willing hands and for busy hands and for work to put in them. Next year we might add Meals on Wheels.

Boxing Day

2011-12-27T20:07:00.000-06:00

I am vaguely familiar with the term "Boxing Day." I know it's mostly a British and Canadian tradition. It has something to do with boxing stuff after Christmas. And that's what I am spending the next few days doing. Tuesday was boxing stuff at the North Texas Food Bank and Wednesday will be at the FPC Dallas Stewpot/Homeless Shelter. I can't give you all the details right now mostly because I'm pretty tired and also because I cut my finger and the bandaid makes it hard to type.

Also, I got an urgent message from Fannie Flamingo this evening about a serious case of Flamingo abuse and if you know Fannie you know she will not let me rest until the matter is settled. So there's that to deal with.

Full details next Wednesday and hopefully the bandaid will be gone and Fannie will be staisfied.

Christmas Angels 2011

2011-12-24T23:59:00.001-06:00

Sunday, December 25, 2011
Angels

As my Christmas gift to you I thought I'd post a copy of a an essay, first published on Christmas morning 1967 in the Dallas Morning News. It was written by Paul Crume, one of Dallas' finest columnists. It's considered a classic in Dallas and they always have it on the front page Christmas morning. It was a joy to get the paper off the doorstep every frosty Christmas morning knowing there would be words of poetry and calm waiting for me. I gained a new appreciation of it when we moved out to the country and couldn't get the paper delivered to our door every morning. It just wouldn't be Christmas for any Dallasite without it. I know I'm not the only one who feels this way so here it is for old friends relocated to new places and new friends who've never seen it.

On this Day, Angels Linger Close at Hand

By Paul Crume

A man wrote me not long ago and asked me what I thought of the theory of angels. I immediately told him that I am highly in favor of angels. As a matter of fact, I am scared to death of them.

Any adult human being with half sense, and some with more, knows that there are angels. If he has ever spent any period in loneliness, when the senses are forced in upon themselves, he has felt the wind from their beating wings and been overwhelmed with the sudden realization of the endless and gigantic dark that exists outside the little candle flame of human knowledge. He has prayed, not in the sense that he asked for something, but that he yielded himself.

Angels live daily at our very elbows, and so do demons, and most men at one time or another in their lives have yielded themselves to both and have lived to rejoice and rue their impulses. But the man who has once felt the beat of an angel's wing finds it easy to rejoice at the universe and at his fellow man.

It does not happen to any man often, and too many of us dismiss it when it happens. I remember a time in my final days in college when the chinaberry trees were abloom and the air was sweet with spring blossoms and I stood still on the street, suddenly struck with the feeling of something that was an enormous promise and yet was no tangible promise at all.

And there was another night in a small boat when the moon was full and the distant headlands were dark but beautiful and we were lonely. The pull of a nameless emotion was so strong that it filled the atmosphere. The small boy within me cried. Psychiatrists will say that the angel in all this was really within me, not outside, but it makes no difference.

There are angels inside us and angels outside, and the one inside is usually the quickest choked. Francis Thompson said it better. He was a late 19th-century English poet who would put the current crop of hippies to shame. He was on pot all his life. His pad was always mean and was sometimes a park bench. He was a mental case and tubercular besides. He carried a fishing creel into which he dropped the poetry that was later to become immortal. He was lonely enough to be the constant associate of angels.

"The angels keep their ancient places," wrote Francis Thompson in protest. "Turn but a stone, and start a wing."

There is an angel close to you this day. Merry Christmas, and I wish you well

Christmas Bells

2011-12-20T21:13:00.006-06:00

Last week we went to our last Christmas program at Dorsey Elementary school. We’ve been staunch supporters of the school since Sarah entered Kindergarten eight years ago.

We had to sit through a PTA meeting but it was easy enough to ignore and I used the time to talk to my daughters. Come on folks, cut me some slack here--I talked very quietly and you know very well what I'm talking about. I think there is a special dispensation for talking during a reading of the PTA minutes and financial report. It would have bored the Virgin Mary herself and I’ll bet she would have quietly gone over the grocery list with Joseph if they had had PTA when Jesus was in the fifth grade.

However, there is no delight more pure than an elementary school program. They will never again in their lives be as innocent or enthusiastic as they are in elementary school. I know from experience that these kids will not be as excited to perform for their parents in junior and senior high. They will be trying their hardest to pretend they do not have parents; that they gave birth to themselves, are independently wealthy and knowing how to play Angry Birds on a cell phone will be enough to land them a really great job someday.

This was a public school so they couldn’t mention You Know Who but that’s OK. We enjoyed the play, whose plot I instantly forgot, and we enjoyed the songs and Santa hats. Essie had three lines but I missed them trying to find my camera so I could capture the event to re-live in years to come. I was so busy ensuring that I could re-live the event that I missed experiencing it even once.

Christmas music is high on my list of favorite music. I’ve got a lot of peppy Christmas songs on my iPod that are great for driving down the road. But for sitting down and being enfolded by love I want to be in church. There’s something so magical about a dark, cold Christmas Eve with Silent Night playing as you leave the church. Knowing that a whole month’s worth of preparation is now over and there’s nothing to do now but enjoy yourselves.

Silent Night makes Christmas but I’ve also become a connoisseur of bells.

For some reason Christmas seems to be the only time of year the bells come out to play. For what they lack in exposure is made up by the quality of their sound. And there’s just a jillion different kinds of bells at Christmas. In one movie they tell us “Every time you hear a bell ring that means an angel got her wings.” Then in Polar Express we find out that you can’t hear the bells unless you believe. Bells get to be a major player in the orchestra of life during Christmas.

I remember the Salvation Army bell ringer one year in Mississippi. I had just arrived in Pearlington to work at the PDA camp to help with the Katrina recovery. By this time I had been to Mississippi about four or five times as a volunteer and knew a lot of the people there but I was still startled to find a familiar face so far from home. It was Miss Johnnie ringing the bell by the Salvation Army bucket. Miss Johnnie was the lady who cooked lunch every day at the First Missionary Baptist Church. Any volunteer in town could get a hot lunch there and it was some of the best food I’ve ever eaten. Miss Johnnie was famous for making the best cornbread in the world. I stopped for a hug and conversation. We talked about five minutes catching up on news of people we both knew. And the whole time she kept ringing that bell like Jesus Christ Himself had personally asked her to ring it. She would pause in our conversation to shout out a hearty “Merry Christmas” to someone then pick up the conversation where she left off. It was the happiest sound I’ve ever heard from a Salvation Army bell. And I think it was because Miss Johnnie was ringing it.

I remember one Christmas Eve when the girls were little. Midnight Worship was almost over and it was late enough that I knew I wouldn’t have much trouble getting them down for the night. Everything was in order for Christmas morning. Close to the end of the worship service Beaven got up and left the pew without an explanation. This always hacked me off. He was always coming home late from work or working on weekends or having to leave in the middle of the night to go fix something at the TV station. Couldn’t he have at least spent the entire worship service with his family? My mood turned gray as my mind mumbled dark complaints.

The end of the service came and the church bell started ringing at midnight. The minister told us: “It’s Christmas Day” and I was instantly relaxed. The bell kept ringing in the new day and I realized that was where Beaven went. It was him ringing the bell.

There is one bell sound that may be my favorite: the Zimbalstern. Margaret, our organist, will add the sound at the end of a song to give just the right touch of delicate joy. She knows how much I like the sound and I feel sometimes that she’s playing it just for me. It reminds me of the sound ice crystals might make as they fall through the air; a little stronger sound than snow but welcoming none the less--the sound of wonder, the sound of love.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said it best. (You might even get the song with Frank Sinatra on iTunes like I did.)

I heard the bells on Christmas day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

And in despair I bowed my head:
'There is no peace on earth, ' I said
'For hate is strong, and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.'

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
'God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men.'

Till, ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime,
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

May you have bells this Christmas: massive Cathedral bells, tiny sleigh bells, Salvation Army bells, angel bells on Christmas trees, Zimbalstern in a quiet sanctuary. May you hear them like the child in Polar Express heard them. May you believe in Love.

A Bittersweet Hallelujah

2011-12-18T19:00:00.012-06:00

This morning, like many churches, we had a rousing rendition of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. The choir was maxed out and the sound beautiful. There was one big difference in this Hallelujah Chorus and it leads me to a lot of questions, most of which I have no answers to.

Twenty years ago today, December 18, 1991 was a Wednesday and our choir gathered that evening to rehearse the Hallelujah Chorus that they intended to sing for Christmas. But one of the choir’s most dependable members wasn’t there and nobody could figure out why he missed practice. He also didn’t go home that night. The next morning they found Brad Carson in his car parked outside his pharmacy with his head blown off.

The pharmacy hadn’t been robbed. The killer took his wallet but didn't use his credit cards. The police thoroughly investigated Brad’s business dealings for anything amiss. They examined his personal life to see if there was some secret, seedy, second life nobody knew about. There was simply no reason for anyone to kill him. The police never found the gun. They eventually had to admit they didn’t have even a good lead and ended up with some theory that it might have been a gang initiation. The case remains unsolved to this day.

There wasn’t a member of our church who wasn’t touched by the tragedy in some way. We all held his wife and daughters while they cried out “why?”

That’s a question none of us have ever been able to answer.

I stopped by the church office a couple of days later to see if there was anything I could do to help. The pastor told me he needed someone to go with him to talk to Brad’s parents and explain to them why the choir intended to sing the Hallelujah Chorus at their son’s funeral. Ron didn’t know how the idea would be received.

Thankfully, it wasn’t a hard sell. As grief stricken as they were, they understood that the song was written about Christ’s resurrection and was indeed very appropriate at a witness to the resurrection marking the end of Brad’s mortal life.

The next 20 years were spent in healing and moving on. And we spent time answering the question, “How on earth does a family move on after a tragedy like that?”

They really didn’t have much choice. Day by day, they got out of bed in the morning and moved on. His wife re-married a few years ago to a wonderful man who hasn’t even tried to replace Brad but has taken his own place in our congregation. Brad’s daughters married and had children. He has four grandchildren now, one who is named after him. And they were all in church today.

Why are some men allowed to grow old and others aren’t? Why are some men allowed to walk their daughters down the aisle and hold grandchildren while others aren’t? I looked around today at those of us who knew Brad and wondered why we are still here and he isn’t. And I can tell you that not one of us is any more deserving of life than the other. Brad and his family were cheated out of something very valuable that the rest of us have received through no accomplishment of our own. And we all understand Grace a bit better today.

There are just a lot of questions I don’t know the answer to. But here is one final question and I do know the answer to that one.

How does anyone manage to get through an experience like this? How did Cindy and the girls manage to put one foot in front of the other every day? How did our congregation manage to give them the love and support they needed in a way they needed it? How did we all emerge with faith in God after something like that?

And the answer was clear this morning: Only by the grace of God; only by daily hand-holding by the Holy Spirit who moved within us, who joined us to God's Self and to each other. Once you wrap your brain around that one the only response possible is to sing the Hallelujah Chorus 20 years later. For the Lord God Omnipotent Reigneth. Evil may walk among us but God always gets the last word.

All glory be to God. Hallelujah! Amen.

Silent Night

2011-12-13T20:17:00.008-06:00

You are getting more of a book report today with a little less original thought. The truth of what happened is so much better than I could think up anyway. The following comes from a book called Silent Night by Stanley Weintraub. This really happened and the author has researched the facts thoroughly.

The story takes place in late December of 1914 on the front lines between Belgium and France. The front lines went on for more than 400 miles from the North Sea to the Swiss border. British, French and Belgium soldiers were dug in on one side, Germans and Prussians on other. Cold rain and mud filled the trenches of No Man’s Land. The men had been sitting there for months and the generals were satisfied to let the stalemate continue indefinitely. Some of the German generals had even begun planning to run electricity to the front in anticipation of a long haul. The soldiers had long ago lost their taste for war and simply wanted to go home. They were tired of living in the cold, unsanitary, muddy conditions with snow and sleet their constant, unwelcomed guest. They had no burning hatred of the other side. There they sat, sometimes only 60 yards from each other, close enough to shout back and forth. It was December.

It started with Christmas Carols--sung spontaneously all down the lines. Carols sung by one side and overheard by the other, then returned; serenading each other. What became known at the Christmas Truce was not one incident but many small acts. It was not in one isolated location but in several different places along the front lines. There was no coordination to the phenomena. It just happened.

On the morning of December 19th, a few German soldiers walked out of their trenches and into No Man’s Land holding heir hands up. They started removing some of their wounded. The British took the opportunity to do the same. Then the Germans called the British over to suggest that they each hold their fire so they could collect the dead for burial. It was a grisly job since some of the bodies had lain on the ground for two months. This took a whole morning and they ended up helping each other, then they had a joint burial service.

Many of the Germans spoke English from their work as waiters, barbers, cooks or cabbies in the resorts across the English Channel. They started talking to each other during the burials and found their enemy to be not that different, finding something honorable and decent about them. Death does that to people.

The German army had thousands of small tannenbaum shipped to the front for Christmas. One German officer even stated that the traditional tree was more important to the men than the war. There is a story told by more than one soldier that a German baker was in the middle of making marzipan Christmas decorations and got so upset by the gunfire that he ran straight toward the enemy holding a small Christmas tree above his head. The enemy was paralyzed with wonder to see the flour-dusted apparition wearing a chef’s hat running toward them holding a Christmas tree. The baker mounted the tree onto the barbed wire fence separating the men. The trees began to appear along the front lines, bedecked with candles and lights.

In one section of the line the Germans sent a note across the lines that they would have a Christmas concert that night and suggested that ’When you see us light the candles at the edge of our trench at 7 pm, ...you can safely raise your heads above the trenches and we will do the same and begin our concert.” In another section they posted signs “We no fight if you no fight.” And the greatest unofficial truce in history began. It went on until the day after Christmas.

Each British soldier had been given a Christmas package in the name of Princess Mary, King George’s daughter. The tin contained cigarettes, pipe tobacco, sweets and a greeting card in the King’s handwriting, “May God protect you and bring you home safe.” They were also receiving packages of plum pudding and chocolates from their families. The Germans had their own Christmas gift from Kaiser Wilhelm: each man received a Mersham pipe, tobacco and cigars. So the men began to trade these boxes for the novelty of a new taste or having a gift from the enemy’s sovereign.

A common battle prize is buttons from an enemy’s uniform. The booty is usually obtainable only by taking it from a corpse. But men started cutting the button’s off their own uniforms and trading them—a much easier prize than killing someone for it.

Soccer games started all along the battle line. They showed each other pictures of their families back home. They exchanged addresses.

All good things end. The generals heard what was happening and were livid. Orders were given to resume the fighting on December 27 or face punishment. In one section of the front the British posted a sign saying “Merry Christmas” and the Germans responded with their own that said “Thank You.” And at 9 a.m. the war resumed.

World War I was the last war where the majority of combatants on both sides were Christians. When we share a faith and its traditions it’s much harder to fight, especially on a religious holiday you both celebrate. I have no more words to add. The story speaks for itself.

Rambling Rant

2011-12-07T07:25:00.010-06:00

Did I ever mention that I think whoever decided to put Christmas in December was a real Bozo?

I think the modern calendar was designed by Julius Caesar, who took the opportunity to name July after himself, and then later modified by Pope Gregory, who didn’t name anything after himself. I’m not sure either of them actually sat down with a cup of joe and went through all the dates and made decisions like “I think I’ll start the year in January and put Christmas in winter.” I think they were mostly trying to get a grip on when spring was so they would know when to plant their crops.

Both Christmas and Easter joined forces with existing holidays to create two super-special days for the Christians and the Halmark greeting cards people. Easter had an easy enough time outshining the celebration of fertility and springtime. It’s hard to beat a good resurrection. All they had to do was remember it’s the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox and figure out a way to incorporate eggs and bunnies into the holiday. But Christmas was actually invented to compete with an existing pagan season. After noticing people were already celebrating the Winter Solstice, the church decided to assign the birth of Christ to winter. The Solstice holiday had a tradition of general debauchery so it was easy enough to just morph that into the office Christmas party. People who know animals know the shepherds weren't "watching their flocks by night" in the cold winter. Jesus had to have been born in the springtime with all the other lambs.

I don’t punch a time clock anymore so I can’t complain but I do remember how busy accountants are at the end of the year trying to close the books. They don’t have time to go to Christmas parties or do any shopping. They’re trying to track down which bonehead bought a copier in July and didn’t turn in the paperwork so they could set up a depreciation schedule. Or, if they’re really smart, they’re shipping all their goods so they can record the income. The freeways on New Year’s Eve aren’t just full of drunks; there are countless freight trucks driving around with boxes full of inventory that's been cleared off the books and recorded as income in the old year. But the people who bought all the stuff don’t want to record the purchases until the new year. So they just keep driving the stuff around for a couple of days. It’s a kind of accounting limbo.

Accounting is just chock-full of cute tricks like that one. And the best ones are saved for the year end. But that takes a toll on the bean counters’ ability to enjoy Christmas.

I’ve been trying to tie up all the loose ends from our October trip to Guatemala and hopefully make sense of dozens of wrinkled scraps of paper with notes and numbers scribbled on them, sometimes in Spanish and sometimes in quetzals, Guatemala’s currency. Then there are the times Linda or I paid for something for the team and need to be reimbursed but we can’t remember how much money we spent or what it was for.

Norte Presbytery gave us the most beautiful gift: a hand-painted comal with the names of all the kids in the Nutrition Project on it. A comal is what the women use to cook tortillas on and it’s made of pottery.

Well, let me show you how gorgeous it was:

And, I guess by using the word “was” I gave away the ending. Here’s what happened:

As soon as we touched it we realized it was not only beautiful, it was delicate as well. Packing it securely would be critical. On the last day of the trip I walked all over Antigua looking for a business who might pack it for the plane. I started running out of time so I went to Plan B and found a pizzeria. In my less than adequate Spanish I tried to explain to the lady I wanted to buy a pizza box. I didn’t want a pizza. I just wanted the box. And I was more than willing to pay for the empty box. Try that one in a foreign language.

But it turned out that even the largest box wasn’t going to be big enough. The comal wouldn’t fit into anyone’s suitcase, either. We decided to wrap it as carefully as we could and take it on the plane as carry-on to hold it in our laps like a precious infant.

We made it through about three different security gates until the last one—the one controlled by our host for the flight: Spirit Airlines. They told us we couldn’t take it on the plane. It was dangerous pottery, they told us. It could be broken and the sharp edges used as a weapon. We assured them that this comal wasn’t dangerous. It wasn’t going to break into sharp edges; if anything, it might crumble. The man at Security was adamant. We would have to check it with our luggage. Now, mind you, we had already checked the maximum amount of luggage we had budgeted for. An extra bag would cost about $35 extra. This was also the same airline that would not allow me to take a sealed bottle of water onto the plane then charged me $3 for a soda once we took off.

Annette was trying to be diplomatic but firm in her eloquent Spanish. But I was screaming in the only Spanish words I knew that this was a gift from the Iglesia, from los niños de iglesia. I wanted to tell them that this wasn’t just any old pottery, it was a beautiful hand-painted and totally safe and delicate GIFT from the children of the Nutrition Project-- A gift made in the name of God. (I thought by naming names it might help and you can’t get any bigger than God.) I wanted to tell them about all the names on the comal-- Yoselin, the deaf girl, and Wilbur, the little drummer boy with the bad eye. I kept screaming “Niños!! Iglesia!!”

Time was running short and Spirit Airlines wouldn’t budge. So, Linda and I pulled out all the quetzals we had left and gave them to Annette who ran with the comal to the packaging kiosk. She got the gift packaged and sent off to the baggage hold wearing a zillion stickers boldly announcing “Fragile.” She made it back just in time to board the plane. The sad ending to the story, of course, is that it arrived in Dallas in about seven pieces. Rob glued it back together but I’m afraid it will never again be the work of art it originally was.

So I’m trying to figure out how to explain all this in an expense report so I can get it recorded in the current year even though I have long since forgotten how much money I gave Annette or how much the packaging cost. This might call for some creative accounting.

Beaven says I'm rambling so I will close. But if you don’t get a Christmas card from me this is my excuse.

ps: I'm afraid I will never be able in good conscious to recommend Spirit Airlines to anyone.

Christmas Gift List

2011-11-29T12:38:00.005-06:00

Dear Elizabeth and Emily,

Who knew what your grandmother started years ago when she declared she wanted contributions to charity instead of gifts for Christmas?

We all agreed that none of us actually needed anything material as a gift. Certainly your grandmother didn’t need another porcelain bird. I think she had every one they made—we were about to have to go into the extinct ones and I quite frankly didn’t know where I was going to buy a porcelain Do-Do bird. And nobody has ever been able to shop for your father. He will never have to buy another shirt for the rest of his life. So the idea to exchange charitable donations came just in the nick of time.

When we started exchanging charities for Christmas it opened up our imaginations. It was such a cool idea that we focused on the novelty of it instead of the impact. We underestimated the wealth of these gifts.

The gift to the Save the River people was so touching. I didn’t know if you were thinking of Uncle Doss and how much he loved the Brazos or just how much I enjoy nature. I like to think a little piece of the Trinity was a gift from you to me.

One of the best gifts was the Alzheimers Association gift. I know you were thinking of PaPa Els and his battle with the disease but we didn’t realize how important their support group would be. I never thought of your father as someone who would enjoy support groups but the one the Alzheimers Association offered gave him a place to discuss the challenges of a parent with dementia. It was many gifts from many generous people like yourself who paid for this support group. I’m not sure I ever told you girls how much that gift and that group helped us. Thank you.

The year Elizabeth gave Dad a donation to the Breast Cancer organization we were stumped as to why anyone would give a donation for Breast Cancer to a man. But Elizabeth’s answer made perfect sense: “Because he has a wife, two daughters and two granddaughters- five pairs, ten breasts in all—all females, who he loves dearly and wants to keep healthy.” A few years after that Christmas present I got breast cancer. But the diagnosis was made infinitely more bearable by a new test that had only recently been developed. Because of that test I was able to avoid chemotherapy. And it has taken me a while to connect Elizabeth’s ordinary donation to my own comfort and health. So I say a hearty, if belated, “Thank You.”

Exchanging charitable contributions was one of the best ideas ever. And the beauty of it is that it really doesn’t matter how much you give since I will never know the amount. It really is the thought that counts here.

So here’s my wish list for this year:

Morgan’s Mercy Mansion here in Winnsboro- I know these people well. These are the ladies I go to Bible Study with and whose prayer group I go to on Thursdays. I know they struggle for money. Sometimes they will pray for the money to buy meat at the store or for dental care for one of the girls. I’m in their building at least once a week, sometimes more, and I know they are not blowing the money on frivolous things. I know any donation you make to them is money well-spent.

The Children’s Nutrition Project in Guatemala is sponsored by the group I travel to Guatemala with and I know for a fact this is a worthy charity. I eat lunch with these children every year when I visit. I know there are no “administrative costs” and the donations go straight to the kids. And when we visit and they give us an account of the previous year it’s not in terms of money collected or spent, it’s in how much weight the children have gained and how much taller they are. We play games with them that shows how much more energy they have and how much more alert they are. I like those kind of statistics.

Faith Ministries- Dad and I have traveled with this group to Mexico to build houses for the poor. I went to the town dump in Reynosa and saw the cardboard houses people are living in. They live close to the dump because this is where they scrounge for food. Because of the drug wars on the border we haven’t been able to go to Mexico for two years. They continue to build houses as best as they can and are trying to figure out a way we can go to Mexico without a daily border crossing. The violence has reduced the number of groups willing to come and they’re hurting for money.

Teeth Savers International- I found out last week that the director of this agency is an old friend from Synod Youth Workshop. He came to our church last week to tell how important dental care is in the third world. He spoke of Sierra Leon, a country with two dentists for over a million people. So they’ve developed a method of filling teeth that can be taught quickly and easily and done cheaply. Their mission is to protect the six-year molars of children. The molars are the grinding teeth. If you lose your six year molars all the other molars come in crooked and don’t grind right. Without the grinding teeth you are reduced to soft food for the rest of your life. Dental care is a huge tool to fight malnutrition.

I know all of these groups and can vouch for them. Just to make things easier here’s all the info you need to make a contribution to them this Christmas.

Morgan’s Mercy Mansion
402 S. Chestnut St
Winnsboro, TX 75471
Or you can donate online by credit card
http://www.mmmrehab.com/

Donations to the Childrens Nutrition Project in Guatemala should be made payable to:
East Dallas County Cluster of Presbyterian Churches (or EDCC if you can’t write that small)
and mailed to the attention of: Frank Karlen, treasurer
Eastminster Presbyterian Church
6550 Samuell Blvd
Dallas, TX 75228
Write “Children’s Nutrition Project Guatemala” on the memo line of your check

Faith Ministries
You can donate with a credit card at their website:
http://www.faithministry.org/

same with:

Teethsavers International
http://www.teethsavers.org/

Love,
Mom

Changing the Church's Clothes

2011-11-22T16:46:00.009-06:00

The best photographs are never taken. They are usually moments in the heart that happen too fast for a camera or in a moment too sacred for the intrusion of photography.

We had fiesta of emotions this weekend with our church sanctuary changing clothes three times.

Elizabeth and John got married in the afternoon on Saturday. We’ve known the bride since she was six years old. and I remember the year Beaven came home from a mission trip to Mexico and told me he thought Elizabeth was sweet on one of the guys she met on the trip. My theory is that there isn’t a better place to meet a future spouse than on a mission trip. They had found the best part of each other and knew how to nurture it and share this part with the world.

There was the usual dramatic moment when the bride entered the church on her father’s arm and I wished for a picture of her smile and I wished I could have a picture of the congregations faces; but photography can’t capture the small sob that catches in your chest and moves up to your throat when you feel so proud and happy you could burst. So I will just have to hold the picture in my heart.

As soon as the bride and groom had left the church and we had cleaned up Fellowship Hall I went back inside the sanctuary to change its clothes. We had to move the chancel furniture back into position and get out the banners for the Confirmation the next morning.

This sounds much easier than it is. Each confirmation class makes a banner to express the beliefs they have adopted during their classes. On Confirmation Sunday when they profess this faith they carry their banner in a grand procession into the church sanctuary. After a few weeks their banner goes on the wall where the others are hung. Right now we have accumulated 11 banners dating from 1992. This makes for a grand procession. I had to get a ladder and take the banners off the wall, find the standards to hold then and the bases. Then put it all together and schlep the heavy concrete bases up to the chancel. All 11 of them.

My exhaustion at all this effort was ameliorated a bit by the knowledge of what a grand procession we would have this year. But it turned out to be even better than I could imagine.. Because of Elizabeth’s wedding we had a lot of “kids” from out of town. Both of the seminary students we've produced lately were home. One graduate brought her baby that we had never met. They trickled in from hither and yon. I had put out a general request asking who would like to carry their classes’ banner on Sunday morning.

I always love a good procession of any kind in worship. This particular procession has grown as new banners are added every two years or so. I had an intricate list in my pocket of who was going to carry which banner. What I hadn’t factored into the equation was how many people from previous classes had come to Garland for Elizabeth’s wedding. People kept coming up to me saying they could carry their class’ banner. I kept adding names to the list and re-arranging it. After the fourth list I just went to the pastor and told her to invite everyone who had ever been in a confirmation class to meet in the chapel during the Passing of the Peace. As the organ began playing “Lift High the Cross” we opened the double doors and a whole generation of people who grew up in our church walked in.

It was a magnificent procession with the 8-foot tall multi-colored banners waving as they walked. As each banner went into the base in the chancel the kids of that class stood by their banner. Each class had designed their own banner and could remember the journey they had taken with the Holy Spirit to come up with their class’ statement of faith that was translated into cloth images with symbols and scripture. It was one of those teary moments that comes in a church family when we realize how much we love being part of a young person’s faith journey and how proud we are to see who they grew up to be.

This is what I wish I had a picture of: Donnice King Michel standing beside Stephanie Stacy Webb representing the Confirmation Class of 1996, to show the congregation that they have married, had a baby and begun careers but still consider our church as their home. In my picture you could see Alissa King who was in town from Louisville Seminary. We had a mother and her daughter: Jamye standing by the banner of 1992 and Makayla with the 2011 banner. The chancel was full. More than a few people were moved to tears and that includes the men.

When worship was over I took a picture of Sarah with her faith partner. Gail and her family have shared a pew with us from almost the minute we joined the church in 1977. I did remember to take this picture.

An hour after worship ended, we changed the church’s clothes again. Our congregation hosted Grace Presbytery’s Youth Led Worship for a couple hundred kids and as soon as I moved the banners off the chancel they started plugging in guitars and microphones.

While they practiced the music for worship I hung all the banners back on the wall and moved the heavy concrete bases back into the closet. I sat in the hall resting and feeling tired. A woman visiting for the youth led worship came and sat with me. I was in the middle of telling her the history of our congregation when I could hear the latest energizer tuning up in Fellowship Hall. I went from feeling as old as the hills to knowing I just HAD to go join the kids for the energizer. So, instead of a photo, I would have to include a video of myself dancing to the music. Since I don’t have one here’s a video from Youtube of the song:

Celebration, it surrounds us
Every nation all around us
Staying forever young
Singing songs underneath the sun
Let's rejoice in the beautiful game
And together at the end of the day, we all say:
When I get older I will be stronger
They'll call me freedom
Just like the waving flag.

It’s nice to have a church steeped in traditions and nostalgia but I like to stay on the forward-looking edge of the timeline. Have a Happy Thanksgiving tomorrow.

Patience and Endurance

2011-11-16T09:28:00.005-06:00

Forty two years ago yesterday I married a man I thought was a dead ringer for Superman, albeit a shorter version of him. Last night I ate dinner with a balding, overweight version of that guy and we spent most of the meal talking about how all the people at our wedding are dead now.

The best man died ten years ago. My bridesmaid became schizophrenic and the maid of honor became a Tea Party Republican. All of the uncles and most of our aunts are gone as well as a good chunk of the guests. About the only ones left from our wedding are cousins and one or two friends.

We spent most of our day apart yesterday and met for dinner at our favorite restaurant in separate cars. We left the restaurant and went to see a movie at the only theatre in town where the popcorn was better than the movie then came home and argued about what we would watch on TV.

In years since I first met Beaven Els we’ve watched about four or five wars play out, depending on what you call a war. As we matured our politics have done an about-turn. We watched the first man step on the moon together. On November 15, 1969 personal computers didn’t exist and you could walk right onto a commercial plane with no questions asked.

We raised two decent kids and weathered alcoholism, cancer and menopause together. We’ve buried four parents and taken some awesome vacations. We’ve accomplished things we never even thought to dream of and we’ve visited countries we never thought we would find exciting. We’ve remodeled houses with our own hands and learned that we don’t know a damned thing about carpentry but we keep doing it ourselves anyway. About the only technique we’ve really mastered is running wires through walls.

We survived two teenagers and they survived us and we will eat Thanksgiving together without much dread.

I vividly remember my thoughts as we left on our honeymoon: “I know nothing about this guy.” And, compared to what I know now, I didn’t. We quite frankly lucked out. Probably the greatest thing we’ve learned in 42 years of marriage is to have patience and to endure.

This coming Saturday we’ll attend the wedding of a girl we watched grow up in our church. She’s marrying a guy she met on a mission trip who reminds me a lot of a younger Beaven. Forty-two years from now most of the guests at this wedding, including Beaven and I, will assuredly be gone. Things Elizabeth and John have never dreamed of will have been invented. They will go places and do things they can’t imagine now.

Life always surprises us. Here’s to Happy Surprises. Here’s to Patience and Endurance. The future is uncertain at its very best but it is never boring. He may not look much like Superman to other people but he still does to me.

Paz, Pax, Peace

2011-11-11T12:39:00.007-06:00

As I write this it is a little past noon on November 11, 2011. Most people call this Veterans Day but November 11th was originally called Armistice Day because it commemorated the day World War I ended. The order for everyone to lay down their arms went into effect at 11 o’clock in the morning of November 11, 1918.

So this morning at eleven I went out to my labyrinth to talk to God. I planned to get a few words in on my side and then just listen to what God had to say.

When we were in Guatemala a couple of weeks ago I had two opportunities to learn something. One was to talk a little more with Miriam Leon about our brief time at the ruins at Quirigua last year when she tried to show me how to feel the positive energy from a tree. I had no doubts that she could feel it. But I couldn’t feel anything and I wanted to ask her how I could learn. Sadly, the opportunity never appeared and I wasn’t sharp enough to create the opportunity. I will either have to wait until next year or figure it out on my own.

The second opportunity for growth came during our bible study (of Phillipians 2:1-11) when Clay instructed us to “empty ourselves” and make more room for Christ. Walking the labyrinth today I decided to just shut up and listen. This goes a long way toward emptying myself.

I picked the perfect place to paint my labyrinth in the grass. It’s a field that is isolated from our house. It shares fences with both of our neighbors and I can see the Bergers’ horses across one fence and the Foy’s goats are on a little bit beyond another fence. I could hear them bleating once in a while. But, mostly it was just quiet today. There was a good wind that came and went. I did have some trouble emptying my mind but when I caught my thoughts wandering, it was easy enough to return to listening to the wind.

The sky is a pure blue today and most of the trees are still green with a few Sweet Gums beginning to turn red and orange and yellow. I walked. And I listened.

A few nibbles came to me that I needed to just be still and know that God is in charge. That didn’t sound like much of a challenge: to be still. Seemed like anybody could do that; it’s kind of a default position—just being still. Didn’t God have anything stronger to assign me?

You and I both know that “being still” is the harder job than taking any kind of action. Nobody likes to be still. I ended my walk with nothing more than a feeling that God is OK with me just praying and being in love with the world.

When I finished my walk I decided to go check on the goats and found Alisa there feeding them. We talked a bit about their growing farm. She has about four brand new baby goats. Her current project is to de-bud their horns which needs to be done within a week of their birth. She’s found a good deal in the equipment she needs to do that and she can go buy it today. One of the babies was still-born and she delivered it herself. Now they have extra milk but can’t milk them until David builds a milking stand. Who knew it was so complicated to have a herd of goats? They’ve lost another rooster to the coyotes and have given up on the hens who have stopped laying. They have taught the kids that you don’t raise animals in order to kill and eat them. So, even though she is OK with “processing” the four hens who aren’t laying, she is stuck with them. Kids have a way of calling your hand if you try to make a move outside what you have taught them.

We talked briefly about my prayers for peace today at 11am on 11/11/11. She told me that she has decided the best contribution she can make will be in raising her four kids to be peaceful people.

There are four Foy children. I have two daughters and grand-daughters. That’s eight people that I know of who will live a good life and be nice to their neighbors. That’s a start.

I’m reading four books at once right now. And it’s developed into another “theme” read. In the fiction category I’m reading Stephen King’s newest novel and it’s about going back in time to change the course of history, making it a more peaceful world.

I also recommend the other three:

“Abide; Keeping Vigil with the Word of God” by Macrina Weiderkehr
“Listening for the Heartbeat of God; a Celtic Spirituality” by J. Philip Newell
“You Don’t Have to be Wrong For Me to Be Right; Finding Faith Without Fanaticism” by Brad Hirschfield

I’m reading all three at once because I think they are all about basically the same subject.

And I mention this to you here on November 11, 2011 because there might not be too much we can do to make the world a better place beyond changing ourselves. It may not sound like much but it is everything.

Treading Water Here

2011-11-09T08:55:00.006-06:00

It's been a slow/busy week. I have been staying with the Tonsil Twins but I'm afraid the only thing I've accomplished beyond dispensing pain meds every four hours is to eat up all their ice cream. About three gallons worth. There have been a couple of times in my life when I've had unlimited access to ice cream and it is never a pretty sight. You don't need to know any more than that.

I had some great videos of inside the van in Guatemala, a fantastic clip of Guillermo playing the accordion with Bobby accompanying him and then an astounding video of leaf ants marching across the woods with their leaves held high. But I can't get the video to download. And somehow I took all the pictures in the bus upside down and the computer can't rotate videos. I'm pretty sure that, interesting as it might be, you don't want to spend time watching movies upside down.

So, for now, we will be limited to a few pathetic still snapshots I took. There are still more lessons to extract from my week and I will eventually get the words lined up. Every time I spend a week with these hermanos y hermanas I learn more about the Kingdom of God.

Here is a wonderful picture of Loida Giron:

The sign at the Childrens Nutrition Project welcoming us:

The kids put on a program of music, etc. But we're not doing videos today, remember.

After fun and facepainting we all had lunch together. For these kids this is probably the only time during the week that they get meat to eat.

One of the things I always learn anew is how vulnerable Guatemala is to the weather. The rainy season always brings rock and mudslides. Last year it was wrecks that tied us up on the road but this year it was rock slides. We had two major waits for detours around stuff, about average for a trip. One wait was an hour and the other was two hours.

On Sunday we made what I call "the march of the Presbyterian Churches." I think we visited 4 or 5 churches that day. Ending up at the church where Rumaldo Lopez preached and we shared communion.

End of slide show. Next week I will tell you about our Matthew 25 experience. Yes--we fed the hungry and thirsty, visited the sick and even took touched base with a prison. Also, I want to tell you about the elections in Guatemala if I can get the pictures to work.

Laughter

2011-11-01T14:12:00.000-06:00

I’m going in for a root canal tomorrow morning and after that I’m headed to Garland to play nurse to Mother-Daughter double tonsillectomies. I am not part of this duo, only the support system-- however, the situation hold the promise of being worse than the root canal. So I’d better write this while I can.

People always ask me what we “do” when we go to Guatemala. My Baptist brethren might be surprised to know that we don’t go to convert the heathens to Christianity. We visit people who are already in the Presbyterian churches, who for the most part are better Christians than I am. After about five years of painting churches we started running out of stuff to paint so we decided to just “Be”-- As in “be” in a relationship with our sister churches and our brothers and sisters in Christ. And it turns out you can stay surprisingly busy just "being."

This year we had another bi-lingual study with the men and women of Presbiterio del Norte. Clay Brantley, the minister of Whitesboro Presbyterien and former Parish Associate at my church, led the study as part of a requirement to earn his Doctor of Ministry degree. I love a good bilingual study because you can pick up a lot of Spanish without even trying since you’re hearing the same thing said in both languages. And I also enjoy spending time with my friends in Guatemala.

We stayed in a very nice hotel that had a meeting room set up for us. We had 13 Norte Americanos and about the same number of Guatemaltecos. We did some serious bible study but I have to admit we had a lot of fun, too.

Guillermo Giron had some music for us. And this year Bobby Connell joined us. Bobby is a professional musician. He brought the most interesting instrument called a “melodica”, kind of combination of piano and flute. He let Guillermo start the song and he would watch Guillermo’s hands finger the accordion then imitate it on his melodica. One day we visited a church that had a keyboard and Bobby played for over an hour during lunch. We have always been pathetically lacking as musicians and people love when you sing for them. This year we did a little better.

On our first morning Clay assigned Rob Leischner to count laughs during the day and submit a report that evening. Rob hammed it up with a faux-notebook and giving a totally serious report. On the third morning Clay assigned me the laugh-counting job. I went far beyond the assignment and assembled an analysis of laughs per minute and then a comparison of laughter on the white bus versus the gray bus. But then, I explained, I got ice cream on my notes. And still later in the day pineapple juice on top of that so I had to abandon my analysis.

But it started me thinking about laughter and exactly what laughter is. It’s not a song or a hiccup. But it's still kind of a combination of the two. The air just forces itself out of your mouth and makes a noise. If you are in church and it’s in the middle of the pastoral prayer this is bad. It’s OK if it’s a birthday party. You can make yourself laugh but the best laughter just happens. You can laugh louder at a party or soften it a bit in polite company. I personally favor a huge horse laugh but it takes special circumstances to bring the big horse laugh. When one comes, though, I don’t try to soften it. Instead, I try to revel in it, nourish it with more oxygen and let it roll. Surprisingly, no one has ever complimented me on my laugh. In fact, Beaven has told me at times that I laugh too loud. But I ignore him.

Clay encouraged us to laugh a lot this week so we did. We just started having fun and forgot to stop.

Right in the middle of all this we visited the Children’s Nutrition Project. This is a program that is our pride and joy. It was conceived in 2003 after a visit when we noticed how sickly the kids looked. It’s a year-long program that finds malnourished kids and gets them healthy again. It’s a totally wonderful program and the best part of our week is always having lunch with the kids.

They outdid themselves this year with all the kids lined up for songs and a program welcoming us. Afterwards we played with them. And that’s when I met Joselena.

When they introduced us to her they said she is deaf and mute. She is 15 but has never gone to school. They have included her in the Nutrition Program because it is the only social interaction she gets.

The hopelessness of her situation hits you immediately. Without knowing how to read and write her isolation is made even deeper. Living in Guatemala means she has no money for medical intervention that might help. She has no opportunity for learning to read and write or even learn sign language. I’m such a chronic communicator this sounded a little like hell to me. What could I do to communicate with her? I took her picture and showed it to her.

Then I had an idea. I gave her the camera and showed her what button to push and had her take my picture.

When I showed her the picture she had taken she made a noise I will never forget. It was close to a gasp but more nasal. I realized this was her laugh. It was the most pure sound I’ve ever heard. Later, as I processed the sound she made I realized that since Joselena couldn’t hear herself laugh she had no control over the sound and no way to fine tune it. If someone tells you that you have a really irritating laugh you can adjust it to change that. Joselena can’t and doesn’t do that. So I figured out this makes it a laugh straight from God. A pure laugh, uninhibited and untouched. Laughter from God.

Then I sent her off to take pictures around the room. As I did that, it occurred that I might not ever see the camera again, that she might drop it or break it, but as soon as the thought hit my mind I answered it with the wild and reckless realization that I didn’t care. Just hearing her laugh was worth anything the camera might cost.

It is a rare treat to discover something straight from God. Something that circumstances or willfulness hasn’t altered. Joselena’s laugh is like that. I hope to see her next year and in the meantime, she has taken Marvin Peñeda’s place on my prayer list. I’m not sure what I’m praying for, whether it’s for healing or hope or help. But God knows and that’s all that matters.

Finding Marvin

2011-10-26T12:50:00.009-05:00

What I learned last week in Guatemala:

• While most of the people on the trip had bought my book few people have actually read it.
• You can have a deep relationship with people you only see once a year.
• It’s impossible to capture the mountains of Guatemala with a camera. (At least, I can't. This is Rob Leischner's photo.)
• However, you can’t take a bad picture of the flowers there.
• Prayer works.
• Cold Eeze works. (For me, at least; sadly, not so much for Hermana Linda.)
• The best bonding to be had is waiting out a two-hour traffic jam in a bus with 20 other people
• It’s the journey, people, not the destination

There is so much to tell and I’ve come home to a full schedule. Let me tell you one of the highlights and let the rest simmer until the words emerge in the correct order.

I’ve been to Guatemala almost every year since 1999. On the 2003 Trip we visited the Bethel church in El Rancho. As we were leaving the church to get back on the road a man stopped me and ask me to pray for him. I wrote about it in my book, which you probably haven’t read so I’ll give you an excerpt:

"The next afternoon we visited Bethel, the church where we got so sick the year before. I recognized some of the ladies from the year before. One man asked that we pray for his back. I had him write his name down in my notebook so I would have the correct spelling: Marvin Mauricio Peñeda Perez. And I assured him that I would pray for him. He was a fairly young man but he told me he had suffered for five years and was unable to work.

"How many names? How many notebooks full of names? The pain, the unrelenting poverty, the disease and war were overwhelming; but I had gotten used to that part and did the only thing I could do. I wrote his name down. Marvin Mauricio Peneda Perez may never remember that he asked me to pray for him. And I might not remember to mention him by name on a daily basis. But I know that God knows his name without consulting a notebook. I know that God knows that his back hurts. I also know that if I were to ask God why God doesn’t do something about it. God might turn the question around and ask me why I don’t do something about it. So I write their names down and I pray."

He’s been on my prayer list ever since. At times I prayed for Marvin’s back and at other times I used him as a generic example of all the Guatemalan people who had medical problems that they couldn’t get treated because of money or other reasons. I remembered Marvin as a young man and know that most men in Guatemala need to work more than one job to get enough money to support their families. And those jobs are always hard physical labor. So Marvin’s problems didn’t just affect his own comfort, he had mouths to feed and mouths weren’t getting fed if he couldn’t work.

When we visited Marvin’s church last week we were asked to lead the adult Sunday School class of about 20 adults. Once I had the floor I began by asking for a minute of personal business. I asked if anyone in the congregation knew Marvin Mauricio Peñeda Perez. As soon as the word "Marvin” left my lips, before I could even get to the "Mauricio Peneda Perez" part, there was murmuring in the congregation, people looked at each other and repeated his name to each other: “Marvin Peñeda? Si. Si!” A young woman in the front held up her hand. He was her husband, she said. And his back is better and he is working.

It was one of the highlights of the trip for me. And it wasn’t so much that Marvin was better, although I know that to Marvin it was everything. But I was so happy to be able to tell them that I had not forgotten them--that someone from another country knows their pain and remembers it. Someone from outside knows they exits, that they matter.

I can take Marvin off my list. But I have a new name to add and I’ll tell you about her next week.

Finding the Real World

2011-10-10T23:25:00.002-05:00

I’ve been sleeping outside in the tent for a couple of weeks now, off and on, depending on my mood. The weather has been perfect. As bad as this drought is, the upside is that I haven’t had to worry about getting rained on. The tent is old and I don’t want to push my luck so dry weather is the best time. Being a true 21st century wimp I don’t like for it to be too hot inside the tent or too cold either. So I have a small window of opportunity here. My ideal temperature range is between 60 and 70. And even then to get a 60-degree low during the night it’s usually in the low 80’s when I bed down. And if it’s a comfy 70 at the night’s beginning it can get down to the high 50’s just before dawn. There is a lot of science involved here.

So my time is limited and that makes the current opportunity even more precious.

I try to keep the tent fully furnished once I set it up for the season. That way I’m not stumbling around in the dark dragging a sleeping bag and pillow through the dirt. I’ve got a great air mattress and for the other comforts of home I’ve added a lawn chair so I can sit comfortably to watch a movie or read a book on my new ipad in between listening to the night. An overturned bucket makes a great bedside table to the lantern. And I can tie a second one to the tent’s wall.

The grands made me change the spot where I put the tent up. We used to keep it by the pond where the overflow empties into the creek. But when we took the tent down for the summer there was a biggo snake hiding under the tent floor. It was only Harold, who we see all the time. Family mascot or not, I guess they don’t want to spend the night with Harold.

So now they want the tent out in the field far from water or brush, where the tent is surrounded by only grass and is not inviting to reptiles seeking sanctuary. This was OK with me because I realized I can see the moon better out in the field.

The first time this fall I slept outside was a couple of weeks ago when the moon was dark. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. But slowly there has been more and more light. A couple of nights ago it was bright enough to see the outline of the moon through the tent canvas. Bright enough that the trees cast shadows. Moon shadows.

There is nothing as peaceful to me as listening to the earth go to sleep. At dusk the birds start telling each other goodnight. Then, as though there was some invisible symphony conductor tapping his baton on the music stand, the frogs begin their song. There are four different kinds of frogs croaking four distinctive croak. I can identify the bull frogs and tree frogs but I’m not sure which the other two are. What amazes me is that they don’t have a “lead frog” who begins and the rest follow; they all start at once in unison. After the frogs come the crickets. The symphony goes on like this for some time into the night.

About an hour into dark I will hear a lone coyote howl. Then they will all howl and I get the impression that I’m surrounded by them because there is more than one pack howling. As soon as the coyotes howl the wild dogs answer. This is a very different sound. It’s not quite a howl but not a bark either. Then come the domestic dogs with very nervous, rapid, high-pitched barks. They sound as though they are trying to not sound scared but not fooling anyone. I know these dogs. They sometimes join us on walks. I know where they live and I know their barks.

Once in a while I will hear one of the neighbors’ donkeys bray at something. People with horses or cattle usually keep a donkey with the herd. A donkey will run off coyotes with a vengeance. This includes dogs, too, and I’ve seen the donkeys in action when my own dogs got too close. Donkeys are the most underappreciated animal on the farms.

This year the night has been sadly quiet. There is no water. All the ponds have dried up. The fish were the first to go. Then the frogs and the crickets. The only night sounds this year have been the coyotes and when I hear them I find myself worrying over them. Where are they finding water? Even the grass has dried up.

When I step into the tent and zip the door behind me everything changes. I enter a space occupied by just me and God. I wean myself from civilization slowly with some music or a book. Then it’s just me and God. Just the two of us in our own little world. A small civilization of its own where God’s Kingdom is no bigger than 9ft by 12 feet. Where I can trick myself into believing that I am the only creature on earth that God has to fool with. I can argue all night or ask embarrassing questions. I try to shut myself up and listen for answers.

Later in the night I may wake up at the sound of an armadillo snuffling by my head, separated only by the canvas, digging in the dirt for insects. At least, I tell myself it’s an armadillo because there is a possibility that it’s a skunk. But since it once literally bumped into the tent and armadillos are notorious for their bad eyesight I’m comfortable that it’s an armadillo.

In the morning I am ready enough to go into the house since that’s where the coffee is. But there’s a reluctance in the transition. I feel like I’m going from one world to another.

What is the real world? Is it the one inside my tent with an intimacy with God? With no distractions? Where you can zip the tent door and eliminate superfluous activities?

Is it the world we have created by putting up walls and roof, added artificial light and television? Or is it the one closest to the bare bones world God handed to us eons ago? Is it the world left as God created it? Outdoors with no barricade to God’s touch, with natural lighting and thermostat. Where the temperature is always the real temperature whether you like it or not. Where the sky reveals every star God created if you can get far enough from the city’s competing street lights.

Is the real world where we spend most of our time? How long does it take for a temporary world to become the “real” one? When I went off to college and didn’t go home until around Thanksgiving I had a strange feeling like I was a visitor in the house I grew up in. Returning to the dorm felt like going home. It had become my “real” world.

What is the real world? Is it the cubicle you sit in at work for about 8 hours? You spend more time there than in your kitchen, in your living room or in your bed. So does that make it the real world?

I tend to think my own real world is wherever I go as long as I can feel close to God there. For me the real world can be found in an old red and gray canvas tent on a clear autumn evening. Next week I will be in Guatemala and the real world will be a bus full of 12 Norte Americanos and the same number of Guatemaltecos. We will bounce over dusty roads filled with potholes and wear out our translators with all that we want to say to each other.

I know how incredibly fortunate I am to have so much time available to play with these ideas. So I try to appreciate every single day and draw near to God as closely and as often as I can. My mind returns to what Thoreau said about his life on Walden Pond:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

I won’t be posting next Wednesday. I’ll be in Guatemala living inside the Kingdom of God: the real world. I want to "suck out all the marrow of life." I'll be back in two weeks to tell you all about it.

Excused Absence

2011-10-05T20:55:00.003-05:00

OK, I’m late this week. I have this one idea I’ve been chewing on that I really wanted to tell you about but life got in the way. We started having fun and just couldn’t stop ourselves.

Our whole family went to the State Fair and had just the most wonderful time, which if you’ve read past blogs, is saying a lot. We love going to the Fair. This year the girls were old enough for Beaven to take them to the corner fence where he used to sneak in when he was their age. Dallasites might be surprised to know that Beaven grew up in the area around the State Fair because it’s just not the best neighborhood in town nowadays. When he was in elementary school his parents moved away from the neighborhood but the family bakery stayed put and Beaven spent his weekends at the bakery. Many times he could just walk to the Fair on Saturdays. So, our Monday was just a great trip down Memory Lane as well as having fun in the present.

Then school was out Tuesday for the teachers to have an in-service day so the girls came out here. We went next door to visit the animals. Sadly, I have to report that the guard dog they got to guard the goats kind of ate the duck. Such is life on the farm, I guess.

Today was my annual physical—the boring kind as opposed to the cancer stuff. The cancer appointments have wound down to six month schedule, hopefully to just fade away eventually. So I figured I could whip out a blog after a quick trip to the doc. But that turned out to be more complicated.

As always, they told me to take all my clothes off then handed me a paper napkin to cover with and turned the thermostat down to about 60 degrees and left for a couple of hours to deliver a baby or something.

No sooner did I get out of there than my daughter called to ask if I could run Sarah to the doctor. She had a fever and headache. So this time they sat my granddaughter with a fever and chills in the 60-degree room and left for a couple more hours. At least she got to keep her clothes on and it turned out to be a sinus infection instead of a raging flu epidemic caught at the Fair.

So you’re not getting much to read today. You can go back to the previous posts on the State Fair. If I can get this other topic to hop around on the keyboard I’ll post a note on facebook. In a couple of weeks I’ll be in Guatemala and that is sure to turn up some stories. I really should be a travel writer.

This Bread Smells So Good

2011-09-27T21:01:00.007-05:00

I had one of those incredible weekends that just left me limp and all Jesus'd up. Thank God I was taking notes throughout the whole thing. Sometimes I feel oddly maniacal in my note taking but there are just so many things to remember. I’m glad I wrote it all down even if it did make me look a little mentally ill.

I went to three worship services, two meetings, (one of which was to totally revamp the Children’s Chapel—talk about a bold weekend), one bridal shower and a dinner with friends. It doesn’t get any better than that. Oh, and I had one phone conversation in the middle of one of the meetings that will give me a major project while I’m in Guatemala. It was a busy weekend.

Our six-hour meeting Saturday morning was to prepare our team for the bi-lingual bible study in Guatemala. We spent some time going over the fine details of a trip to the country (passing out malaria meds, dispensing advice like what to pack and how to brush your teeth with bottled water) and then a little study of the three scriptures we will use to guide us through the week.

In the middle of the meeting I got a phone call from the guy who had supervised the installation of a Living Waters for the World system in one of the towns we will visit. I had told Bob that I could do any follow-up he needed while I was there. The beauty of LWW is that even though I’m not on Bob’s “team” everyone gets the same training at Clean Water U and Bob knew I could do what he needed me to do.

I raced over to the bridal shower as soon as the meeting was over. I missed all the chit-chat and gift opening but they still had cake. Perfect timing. I must remember this trick.

Even better, Nancy was at the shower. Except she has requested to be incognito for this story. She suggested I refer to her as “Natasha.” After all the guests left Nancy/Natasha and Traci lingered behind. When Traci found out Nancy had an alias she wanted one, too and requested to go by “Sandra Bullock.” They really needn’t worry. The story isn’t about them. They didn’t do anything remotely colorful or worthy of ridicule unless you count Guilt by Association.

Nancy is famous for her curiosity. Once in a while, usually when her husband is out of town, she will visit a very un-Presbyterian worship service somewhere. Her only restriction is finding something on a Saturday night. She’s been to Temple Emanuel for a jazz-themed Shabbat and to Polka Mass with the Catholics. Her curiosity and her worship are both sincere and respectful. In fact, she goes to great length to blend in with the regulars.

Traci graduated from Seminary a while back and is always looking for interesting worship services before she gets tied down to one church. Traci and I are always game for anything Nancy wants to cook up.

Which brings us to the parking lot at the Eastern Orthodox Church in Plano. Nancy had googled a list of the unique things the Orthodox do in worship. And it was a pretty intimidating list. It turns out that they stand for the whole service, spend a lot of time bowing, bending, kissing icons and crossing themselves—not to mention that they cross themselves backwards from the way Roman Catholics do.

So we sat there in the parking lot practicing how to cross ourselves correctly so we could blend in. We sat for what seemed like forever waiting to find a woman wearing slacks. We all had on slacks from the shower. Nice slacks, not blue jeans-- we’re not a bunch of hillbillies at my church, just relaxed. But we wanted to be dressed appropriately out of respect. The longer we sat there the more intimidated we got. We decided maybe we should wait and call the church to get clarification on the dress code before we visited. So, we bailed on the Orthodox and went to Plan B.

I’m not sure where Nancy got the Plan B church but she had several websites printed out for Plans B, C, and D, based on geographical sections of town. Plan B church was only a couple of miles away. It was billed as a “missional” church. I’m not sure exactly what that means. It turned out this church was just another “mega-church-in-the-making”, one of those new charismatic groups with no order or doctrine, just worshipping God willy-nilly as the moods strikes them. The exact opposite of the Orthodox church.

The sermon was OK as sermons go. My notes became a kind of stream of consciousness exercise. After about three pages my attention was starting to wane and I wrote, “He has made his point and is now beating it into a bloody pulp.” I read through their hymnal. Then I flipped back through my notes from the earlier meeting. And recorded my current thoughts: “Now he’s starting to shout about abortion.” And finally, “Now he’s shouting just for the sake of shouting. He must be ready to wrap it up.” Sure enough, at that point we sang a song and had quiet time for prayer and it was over.

Apparently, we had missed the offering completely or they had collected it during the first fifteen minutes we missed by hanging around the Orthodox parking lot crossing ourselves. We realized the sermon itself had been an hour and a half long. Polka Mass this wasn’t.

Natasha, Sandra Bullock and I went to dinner to dissect the worship and cross the church off our list. I decided to stick to being Presbyterian for a while.

My next worship was the Sunday morning contemporary worship at home. It was nice to worship where I didn’t have to worry about not understanding what we were doing. Our Sunday morning worship is contemporary, and very informal. Sometimes we even clap. And we always have Communion.

Anne has probably done Communion hundreds, if not thousands of times. No matter how informal the service, Anne always leads a magnificently dignified Communion. She stood behind the Lords Table and began the sacrament. But as she pulled away the cloth napkin covering the bread and began the liturgical words: “On the night our savior was…” she stopped dead in her tracks. Her whole demeanor changed. Her body relaxed from that of worship leader to ordinary human. In a husky almost sensual voice that she couldn’t contain she said, “Boy, this bread smells sooo good.”

When I went up to take Communion by intinction I leaned over to smell the bread before I took a piece. Anne was right. It smelled divine. Yeasty. Fresh. Flavorful.

Sometimes worship is experienced beyond the rote words. My weekend was still young and I had more meetings and another worship service that day. But it was the bread I remember. Sometimes the most ordinary moment comes upon you and stops you dead in your tracks. Jesus is sneaky that way. Everything I had done over the last two days was done in an effort to bring God’s Kingdom to earth. Yet I had almost forgotten to appreciate the little bits of Heaven right in front of me.

Sometimes we need to stop in the middle of all the meetings and smell the bread.

Words

2011-09-20T22:55:00.010-05:00

I love a good To Do list. I'm one of those people who loves the whole list thing so much that if I end up doing something that's not on my list I'll write it down just so I can cross it off. I've even perfected how to keep the list--I write it on the bathroom mirror with a dry erase marker. That way I can't lose it. I see it every time I go into the bathroom,. I can write big and bold but still see my face in the mirror. And it's easy to wipe off with a Kleenex.

I tried to take a picture of today's list but everyone knows that taking a picture of a mirror just never works. You've seen enough of those pictures on Facebook.

This time last year I had a To Do list that included scheduling surgery. My list today was a little bit more laid-back:

"Paint living room. Mail invitations. Find camera battery. Blog." It certainly beat having surgery.
The invitations were for my annual fall gathering disguised this year as a bridal shower. That was easy enough to do. I ended up painting only one wall of the living room. I didn't find the camera battery. And it has been a little harder to come up with the blog for this week. But that certainly wasn't the fault of my list system. Sometimes the ideas just don't come. Especially when you live a peaceful life. Don't get me wrong--I enjoy my peaceful life. But sometimes it's ...how do I say it?...tame. Tame and lame.

I haven't taken the Concealed Handgun License class yet so I can't write about that. I would really love to write about stairs this week after finding yet another really great set at Presbyterian Hospital last week. Stairs are one of my favorite things on earth but I think I've already written about that. There is nothing to rival a good set of elegant stairs. Perkins Chapel and Dallas Hall at SMU are two great ones-- just in case you're in the SMU neighborhood and have the time I recommend them. The stairs at the Natural History Museum at Fair Park are pretty good, too. Don't get me started on stairs.

I've come to the bottom of the barrel and it looks like I'll have to write about the art of writing.

There are two elements of writing. You have to have something to say first. And the better the message you have, then the better chance you have of writing something good. But once you have that in hand you still have to pick out some words and then put them in the right order. That is the fun and frustration of writing. Now that we have video and YouTube on our cell phones we're not restricted to words. I have used both photos and videos here before and it always makes the message so much better. But we still use words to paint those pictures and sometimes that works out better than an actual photograph. Photos show you what is there. Words tell you what you can't see.

One of my favorite authors has a new book out this week. I spent a weekend with Sister Macrina Wierdekehr several months ago at a monastery in Arkansas learning how to find my inner monk. She admitted to being distracted that weekend because she had a deadline to finish her latest book and turn it in to the publisher the following week. It's finally here and is called "Abide." Here's what she says in the book's foreword about the writing process:

"Long before I knew anything about the Word of God, I found words intriguing. As a child I took delight in rearranging words into phrases and patterns, stories and poems. Perhaps, even then, I was romancing the Word. I was discovering that words bless. They move and dance and sing. They abide. They absorb and unite. They inspire. Words invite us to feel included, loved, honored. They call us to play and to work. They teach, comfort, praise. They forgive. They ask us to be authentic and true. They summon us to go deeper into the mystery of our lives..."

I have that same kind of relationship with words although not as successfully as Sister Macrina. I love to line up a bunch of words and move them around and take them out to play. Once in a while if you are very lucky you can get the words to dance for you. Sometimes it's a jazzy tap dance and sometimes a ballet.

Years ago I found a sentence so perfect that I not only cut it out of the magazine, I read and re-read it so many times I had the final sentence memorized. If anyone were to ask me my favorite sentence out of everything I've ever read I wouldn't have to think. For years I thought I had lost the clipping and had to console myself that I at least had the sentence memorized. About a month ago I found the clipping. I scanned it and made another three or four copies so that I would never lose it again.

It was written by Bill Moyers in Newsweek magazine back when he had a regular column there. The magazine was dated October 21, 1974. The essay was forgettable in that he talked of something as ordinary as a family visit he had had with his relatives. There were many words of family history and vivid descriptions of personalities along with a couple of stories that gave you a flavor of what his family was like. But there was just something about the way he arranged the last sentence that caught me. The cadence and speed of the way he presented the words to the reader has stayed with me all these years:

"In recapturing the past last week we were not trying to do so in some idealized way, to make things what they never were, nor to escape; a 70-year-old man who has buried four of his five children doesn't extol the good old days, and I still have places to be. We were looking, instead, for landmarks to share again after years of separate journey, and in ordinary places, while there was still time, we found them."

My vote for the best paragraph in American Writing in my limited experience. Until next week, I remain yours truly, an unapologetic Word Nerd.

I'm not sure why this is not coming out better than this except that I was scanning one of the copies I made. I will try to scan the original but I'll have to find it first. I'm sure I put it somewhere really safe which almost guarantees I'll never see it again.

Herding Goats

2011-09-13T07:31:00.002-05:00

We have had a lot of neighbors in the last forty years and four houses. They ran the spectrum from the kind we tried to avoid (because she was a predatory and boring talker who didn’t know when to stop) to Emily’s childhood best friend who lived across the street. We maintained pretty strong boundaries with some of them (the Talker) and some we didn’t have any boundaries at all. Emily traded clothes so frequently with the girl across the street that I often suggested that we should just pile their clothes in the middle of the street so they could just pull from the common pile in the morning when they dressed.

When you buy a house you know nothing about the people you will be sharing a latitude and longitude with. I’ve come to appreciate the give and take that comes from sharing geography. In spite of the Talker, we’ve really never had a bad neighbor. And we have grown to appreciate the intimacy of living next door to someone.

One neighbor called us when she found her husband dead on the floor. Another invited us to their 50th wedding anniversary and I realized we have known them for much of that time. One needed Beaven to break the window of the car when she accidentally locked her grandbaby and her keys inside. Believe it or not, I have been called to help find dentures for not one but two different neighbors in different towns. (nota bene: The trick is to look for something pink and you can spot them easily. There are a lot of white things on the ground but not that many pink.)

But last week was the first time I’ve helped my neighbor herd twenty goats back home when they escaped from their pen.

Oh, yeah, I’m gonna love these people.

They moved in a couple of months ago and I’m still trying to keep track of everybody. Listen to the list: two dogs, two cats, two good goats named Misty and Sally, a totally different herd of twenty very unruly goats, a flock of chickens and a rooster, two geese, one duck and one calf named Suzi. Oh, and a new donkey to guard the calf against the coyotes. Humans come with the package: a husband and wife, four kids (children, not goats) and a grandmother who is my age. There is someone for me to play with at any given moment however the mood might strike me.

When Alisa and David moved in they already had two very well-mannered goats who had been raised from babies. They never gave anyone a minute's trouble. But Alisa wants milk and to get milk you have to have a baby goat and Misty and Sally are both girls. And no matter how socially liberal you are, everyone knows that won't work. So they have been on the look-out for a male. Then someone offered to trade a whole herd: males, females and babies. Twenty goats in all exchanged for a measly chicken coop. Sounds like a bargain, doesn't it? However, in retrospect, you might beware of goats on the discount rack.

I was coming home from Thursday morning prayer meeting with the rehab ladies to find Alisa’s blue SUV stopped in the road with the herd milling around in another neighbor’s pasture. Alisa was holding a wriggling and bleating goat. I pulled over just as she plopped the goat into the back of her car. One down, 19 to go. The only problem was that the pasture the goats were lolling around in was over a mile from our houses and their home pasture.

I called Beaven. She had already called David. Both husbands arrived about the same time.

We decided to just walk them home instead of trying to catch them one at a time. You never know when you might show up on America’s Funniest Home Videos doing something like that. It turns out that it’s not really too hard to herd goats if you have four people and a lot of patience. We soon figured out the right distance to walk behind them (too close and they would break into a run; too far and they might change directions). Each one of us took a corner and just walked them home.

However, it wasn’t exactly the stroll in the park it might seem. We had a pretty steep learning curve in the mile or so it took to get them home. Most of the land around here is owned by three or four main families but they have divided it into a lot of different pastures for their cattle and horses. All I know is those goats took us on a tour through about eleven barbed wire fences., sometimes wandering out on the road and crossing over to the other side then back.

We started out in one of the fields that belongs to one of the Cobbs. We went through Timmy Brown’s field then across the road to his brother Tommy Brown’s horse pasture then next door to the Asbill’s farm (not quite a far as their chicken houses but closer to the house where we met their favorite cow) then back across the road to Billy Cobb’s pasture then through the barbed wire to his homestead then through another fence to his other pasture where we met more horses. The goats threatened to cross the road again to the Pruitt’s place but we managed to herd them back to Billy’s and finally going diagonally to the back pasture of their new family and their pen.

It was our first cool morning after a blistering string of hundred degree days. It was just cool enough to believe that God has not forgotten us; that we might have an autumn and maybe even some rain. There was promise in the morning. None of us really minded being outdoors and having some good exercise. Certainly it was a great bonding experience for new neighbors to share. It beat looking for dentures, at any rate.

I learned a lot about barbed wire fences and how to get through them faster. I learned what a cruel trick of nature it is when wild blackberry vines grow up along barbed wire fences. That made them almost impassable and sure took the starch out of you, especially when you're wearing shorts. But now I will know where the blackberry vines are when springtime rolls around.

I tried to think poorly of these goats with their lack of cooperation, with the obvious answer to why their previous owners would give them up so easily. But, try as I might, words like “spawn of Satan” just didn’t seem to fit them. They are so small and cute with their bleats and baas. They looked so innocent and curious to see if I might be offering food when I held out my hand. They are simply adorable.

When we got them back into their pen the new donkey looked a little bemused at it all. Her job is to watch the calf. Goats were not in her contract. I think a goat herding dog is next on their list.

And now, after the whole adventure, of course, I want a goat. But I realized what a much better deal I have. I can visit them and pet them any time I want; even herd them once in a while but I don’t have to pay for them. It's win-win. I live right next door to a veritable petting zoo. They let me feed the animals one day when they went out of town.

Thank you, God.

The chickens don't have names except for Reggie the rooster. I don't know if this is him. All chickens look alike to me.

Suzi will bond to her humans by being hand-fed.

This is one of the polite goats.

The duck thinks he's a goose.

Even I can tell the difference.

The unruly, wayward goats finally back in their pen.

Seasons in the Sun

2011-09-07T09:01:00.001-05:00

This is going to have to be fast today. It’s 54 delicious degrees outside right now and with the cooler temperature we’ve got a whole list of things to do today. I’m planning to paint the living room and Beaven wants to pour some concrete to build a dam for our pond. Well, actually, if the truth be known, he doesn’t want to do anything. It was more my idea than his. But this is the perfect time to do it.

We are abuzz with projects in our now bone-dry pond. We haven’t had to mow since May until I noticed the only grass we have growing is in the bottom of the pond where the last hints of moisture lay and grass has sprouted up. So I drove the mower right down into the pond and made a quick trip around the edges where the grass now grows. I can’t do that everyday, now can I? However, weather like this comes with a high price tag.

The great state of Texas is on fire, folks. While the northeastern part of our country is flooded, the TV says 82% of Texas is in an extreme drought. The other 18% is merely drier than a witch’s tit. Our governor has pleaded with us to avoid any activity that could cause a fire. And he’s not just talking about throwing your cigarette butt out the car window. He’s talking about mowing.

I know this for a fact. I once started a fire in our field while mowing. This is possible any number of ways. The tall dry grass contacting the red-hot exhaust can ignite the grass. Or you can run over a rock and make sparks fly amidst dry tinder. Even sunlight on a shard of glass lying atop the grass can start a fire. You don’t always need a stupid human to start a wildfire. Sometime Mother Nature can do it herself.

There are fires all around us. We live about an hour from the most popular camp in our presbytery. All the Presbyterian churches use Gilmont for retreats. If you’re Presbyterian in the Dallas area, the chances are that you’ve been to this camp. The cedar cabins are old and weathered. They also have a brand new conference center of cedar and pine. The whole camp is just one big woodpile nestled in a forest of thick pines.

When the camp manager’s wife posted on facebook that the wind had shifted and a wildfire was headed for Gilmont, I figured it was all hands on deck. I threw a couple of shovels and a chain saw in the car and took off.

It’s been a while since I got a speeding ticket on my way home from a defensive driving class to dismiss a speeding ticket. I’m proud to say that my habits have changed dramatically since my conversation with God. (Me: God! Why do I keep getting speeding tickets? God: Because I want you to slow down.)

Then I realized that not only were all the state troopers waiting on the side of the interstate roads for Labor Day speeders, any remnants were probably at the fires. Plus (and this is the best part): if a cop stopped me and ask “Where’s the fire, lady?” I would have a good answer for him. So I cranked it up to 80 almost as an obligation.

But by the time I got to the camp the wind had shifted again and there was not a wiff of fire or smoke. And the camp was deserted. So I drove around a bit to double-check then came back home. Slowly, this time.

Yesterday, however, we drove to Tyler and were quickly surrounded by thick fogs of smoke in the low-lying areas. There are about four major fires in our area and even more smaller ones. As I write these words, I can smell smoke from my front porch.

We need rain, God. My pond isn’t the only one that has dried up. All the wildlife that depends on these drinking holes has disappeared. Even the mosquitoes and chiggers have disappeared. I haven’t heard a frog in weeks. All the regular night sounds that I find so relaxing have been replaced by the anxious howls of coyotes answered by equally anxious family dogs. Even with a German Shepherd on guard our neighbors have lost a couple of chickens. The fish died when the pond dried up and the raccoons who leave their tracks by the edge of our pond have had to move on down the road. And I worry where they will find water.

I’ve had enough of this summer from hell. We’ve passed Labor Day for crying out loud; it’s time to change the seasons.

Our family is in the midst of planning the family vacation of our lives. Elizabeth, courtesy of an extremely rich and generous boss, has paid for us all to go on a Disney themed cruise for five days next summer. We leave on June 29, 2012. And we have set out to plan the guts out of this vacation. No one can get sick or require surgery or have jury duty that week. In anticipation, we are counting down the days with a paper chain we made over Labor Day. It is just an awesome sight to see it draped over the walls of Elizabeth’s office at her house. It runs the perimeter of the room and then some.

Each link is a day we must live, enjoy or regret, remember or try to forget.

As of today we have 296 days until we leave. That’s a long time. We’ve got a Thanksgiving and Christmas to go. Easter, Mothers Day and Fathers Day. Snow days and birthdays. Each of us will be a year older by the time we leave. And there will be even more milestones we can’t even anticipate.

Beaven often tells me “Don’t wish your life away.” I read all the time about living “in the moment.” That is going to be much easier for Beaven and I than our grandkids and I suspect we may all be sick of the paper chain of days before our plane takes off. It’s common knowledge that planning a vacation can be almost more fun than taking it. With a 300-day build up, moments of the actual week are bound to disappoint.

But I will be happy to just get out of this summer and into the next one. It can’t get any worse.

And just as I was about to hit "publish post" the scanner announced all "Quitman fire department please report for a possible structure fire." This isn't the smoke I can smell from my front door, Quitman is too far. It's in addition to that fire. Have I made my point?

Work

2011-08-31T14:57:00.009-05:00

OK, so I’m a little late this week. I’m having computer problems and a bunch of other stuff going on. But at least I have power. My oldest daughter didn’t have power at work one day last week because they had a fire in the building. Now, the interesting thing about that is that her building is where George W. Bush has his office. Once in a while she will pass the secret service detail with W in the parking garage. So, when she drove into work and saw all the red, white and blue lights flashing on a bunch of official looking cars she assumed someone had found W and had made mischief.

I do not know exactly what he does in this office but at least he has the sense to go off somewhere and stay out of Laura’s hair. I think W has figured out his best shot of having any kind of place in history is to just keep his mouth shut and fly below the radar. And he’s done a pretty good job so far. He did have a very decent (classy, in fact) interview on National Geographic channel a couple of days ago.

Now let us pause for a minute to absorb the fact that the only place you can get a speck of journalistic integrity in America nowadays is on the National Geographic channel. National Geographic—the people with maps and pictures of icebergs and the Amazon River. These are the only people left in America with no political agenda. Except when you start throwing plastic into the ocean. Then you gotta watch out because, Sister, they will come and get you and Lord knows what they will do to you if they catch you. I don’t even want to think about it.

Dearie me, where was I?

Oh, fires at work. So…she found out it had nothing to do with Dubya at all. It was some sort of quasi-fire in the electrical workings of the building. Because if you haven’t heard, it’s hotter than hell in Texas this summer and all the electricity is overloaded because we're all running the AC at ninety miles an hour. A bunch from her office went to breakfast together then checked in to find they couldn’t go back to work so they all went to a movie then found out they could just go on home if they wanted.

Is there anything more delicious than a skip day from work? I always managed to work at places that held to a firm work ethic and expected me to show up on time no matter the weather. And because I was raised in that same work ethic I was always a good little soldier. Until the day I realized the new car I was driving over icy roads cost almost as much as my annual salary. I wasn't nearly the good soldier after that.

When I worked at the bank they always drilled it into us that it was a law that we couldn’t close the bank for any reason so everybody was expected to trudge into work come hell or high water. And this included snow and ice. They would send one of the maintenance guys out for sandwiches fixings so we didn’t have to leave for lunch. The bank would be blissfully empty except for the old people. For some reason the old folks loved to get out in the ice and snow and walk to the bank and visit each other in the lobby. No wonder old people break their hips all the time.

Maybe the old people don’t get out as much now that everything is computerized and online but years ago you could go into your bank and have a face to face conversation with a real person. The First National Bank of Garland was the oldest bank in town and the old people, who had started out as young people, felt a real kinship with their bank after so many years. It was part of their social scene. People had their favorite tellers and they knew each others’ families. They had all gone to high school together.

There was one loan officer who notoriously would not make a loan to a young person if it was for a motorcycle and he knew their parents. And there was one elderly lady who started bringing her gigolo into the lobby with her and would make huge withdrawals. Some of the tellers suspected the guy was milking her for money. One day she came in with him and tried to cash in a pretty big Certificate of Deposit and the teller wouldn’t do it for her. She had to complain her way up the hierarchy of the bank until she got to a new officer who didn’t know her.

It’s probably one of the most underappreciated aspects of the old time small town banks: the bank employees know your personal business and they take their responsibilities seriously.

It was also understood that you never talked about a customers’ financial business. There was a line drawn that we never crossed. We might know who you wrote checks to, how much you gave to the church, how often you over-drew your account or how far behind you were in your loan payments but we never talked about it to anyone. It was never written out in a policy manual; it was simply understood.

When I was an auditor we were in charge of making sure the numbers added up to the right amount. One of the most interesting things I discovered about banks is how little they think of actual money. Cash is actually a huge inconvenience to a teller. They have to add it all up all the time and make sure it’s all there. At some point cash loses its meaning and becomes merely limp pictures of presidents. The bills were always sticking together and rubbing ink off on your hands. Cash was always a real pain.

One memorable day my auditing partner decided it would be cool to count every single penny in the whole bank in one 12-hour day. It had never been done before and we soon learned why. We started at 7 am when the drive-in opened, then went inside to count all the lobby tellers, then down to the basement to count the vault and finished by 7pm when the second shift of the drive-in closed. I think it was around two million dollars. That may sound like fun but let me assure you it was a day from hell. Neither one of us had ever been tellers so we were the most awkward money counters ever. By the end of the day my back was killing me and my hands were filthy. But we knew for an absolute certainty the number for cash that day was correct. I slept good that night.

And you should too, because this week’s post is now officially over. See you next week. Hopefully my life will be more interesting then.

The Help

2011-08-23T11:23:00.001-05:00

The movie of the summer has turned out to be The Help. I read the book when it first came out and when I found out they were making it into a movie I saw an opportunity. I really think this is the kind of movie that is best viewed by a group of friends of different races. The movie just begs for discussion afterwards. It goes a long way in understanding the struggles of the civil rights era in the late 50’s and early 60's. Enough time has passed for healing. It’s time to talk to each other about it.

First, I needed a negro. So I invited Cosalind to go see the movie with me. We are comfortable enough with each other that if the movie stirred up difficult feelings or memories we would be able to deal with it in love.

Cosalind is a friend of Emily’s, who has actually become a friend of our whole family. When my granddaughter Essie first started going to kindergarten at Kinder Care, Cosalind was her teacher. Essie came home from school one day talking about Frida Kahlo. Who was this child’s teacher, I wanted to know, who was giving four year olds an education that included the great painters of the 20th century? Frida Kahlo for four year olds? Cosalind Frank was who; an extraordinary teacher.

I have another fantastic connection with Cosalind. She and I share the same birthday. And since the day usually falls around the long Thanksgiving weekend she can come out and spend a day or two with us. She loves my pecan pies and I can usually bribe her to come visit by promising her pie. My kids have long since stopped making a fuss over the fact that I do, in fact, make the best pecan pie on earth. But Cosalind will drive 90 miles to eat it.

Maybe I made a miscalculation in inviting someone born more than 20 years after the major portion of the civil rights movement. It turns out she doesn’t have any “difficult” feelings from the civil rights era. Not only did she go to a mostly white high school, most of her friends were white. Her grandmother did work for a white family in Louisiana but they had such a good relationship that her grandmother entertained the white family in her home on occasion.

So, if she didn’t experience discrimination first-hand, I wanted to know how the history of the civil rights movement was passed down to her. Did she learn from church? Neighborhood friends? Family? She did seem to know a lot more of the historical figures in the movie than I did. Emmit Till was a vaguely familiar name to me but only vaguely. I was starting to think maybe she did pick up some personal knowledge of “the struggle”. Then she admitted she had taken African American History in college.

Clearly what I had here was a defective negro.

It almost made me want to ask for my money back. Because I had insisted that I pay for her ticket and popcorn. A gesture on behalf of my ancestors to her ancestors, you might say. Making historical amends.

I have other black friends I could have invited but most of them are in Mississippi. I met them when I spent several months working on rebuilding houses after Hurricane Katrina. Pearlington, Mississippi has plenty of black people and I became pretty good friends with some of them. I installed Shirley Thompson’s toilet, for goodness’ sakes. You gotta be friends after a thing like that.

My friends in Mississippi probably have better stories than Cosalind. They’re older, for one thing. They have seen Jim Crow in full bloom.

Pearlington is so tiny that I don’t think they have room for a black part of town or a white part. Everybody just lives where they live. The town is so undeveloped that huge plots of pine trees sometimes separate houses.

A volunteer asked me one day whether we were helping more white families or blacks. I had to think a while on that one. I ended checking a list I carried in my pocket of the 14 houses we were working on that week. I went down the list and counted. I had to stop a couple of times to think who was what race. The tab ended up 6 white families, 6 black, one mixed marriage and one couple I honestly didn’t have a clue what race they are. I had face to face conversations with them at least six times. I knew their kids’ names, what church they went to and where they lived before Pearlington. But I didn’t really know what race they are. I guess I could have looked it up on their paperwork if I wanted to.

And that’s another point worth making here. I can tell the whole “race” blank will soon disappear from information forms in the future simply because we will become so diluted and inter-married that people won’t be able to keep track of it.

What I wanted to find out from Cosalind was her own experience or her family’s stories. I’m about as white as you can get. But I watched the civil rights struggle unfold on my television screen as a teenager and I felt very invested in the need to change things. It was all played out on television right there in my living room. I saw the fire hoses turned on people, the attack dogs snarling at little children, the burned out busses. And I saw all this while the news was fresh, while it was happening and you didn’t know what tomorrow would bring. I wanted to know if a white person like me is more aware of those struggles than a black youth of today, 40 years removed. I wanted to ask Cosalind how much the average black youth of today understands about the movie The Help. Did they have a full appreciation of what their parents and grandparents had been through?

But you know what? We got off the subject and started talking about something else and never got back to the topic. We just started having fun with the evening and forgot about history.

However, the movie also touched on another topic that we talked about: women who raise other women’s children then have the children leave their lives. Women who spend more time with children than their own mothers do; then the time comes and the children disappear never to surface again.

Cosalind has worked at Kinder Care for six years now, long enough that the kids who started out in her kindergarten class began their last year of Kinder Care this week. She has kids she’s “raised” and worried over every day for the last six years. She doesn’t have biological children of her own; instead, every child she encounters becomes her own and she loves each one of them like they are her own. Some of them will leave Kinder Care in May and she’ll never see them again. I gained a greater appreciation of that plot line by talking to my non-civil-rights-struggled friend.

I do have to say one more thing about the movie. It sure will make Cosalind look at my pecan pie differently this Thanksgiving.

That’s an inside joke. You gotta go see this movie to understand it. It’s hilarious. It’s more hysterical laughter than history lesson. And, thank God, so was my evening.

Lamp Lady

2011-08-17T09:19:00.009-05:00

A couple of my favorite blogs have recently featured unique...um...let's just say "objects d'art" The The Bloggess started it with her Big Metal Chicken. You gotta read that story first to get the flavor. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Then my other favorite blog, Momastery had to show off her Mrs. Wardlowe, a giraffe.

All the time I'm thinking "That's nothing compared to The Lamp Lady." I ran across a picture of her last week and submit her for your enjoyment.

The picture really doesn't do her justice. She's much bigger in person, for one thing. Plus, in person you can see that there is a hole drilled into her head for the lamp to attach to. I still feel uneasy thinking how long she has had this mother of all headaches.

Because I'm pretty sure this is a craft from the Fifties Era. Possibly crocheted and created during either a really bad menopause by a woman with far too much time on her hands. Or maybe she comes from a craft class at a mental hospital before someone got their meds adjusted.

I found her at a Women's Retreat years ago. I think there was some sort of weird gift exchange that year. The minute I saw her I knew she had to be mine. There was an auction and I got her for some ridiculously low price like 50 cents when I was prepared to go to $100. She was worth every penny, too.

Emily and Steve had just moved into a new house with a huge picture window in the front of the house. I insisted Emily show off Lamp Lady. Emily told me that once Lamp Lady was in place nobody came to introduce themselves and welcome her to the neighborhood with a plate of brownies. But Lamp Lady was in all her glory there on a table peeking through the half-opened curtains shining her light in the evenings like a beacon for the dispossesed.

And I have a horrible confession to make. I think, well, I'm pretty sure-- I sort of threw her away in a fit of cleaning one drab day. She only lasted a month at Emily's before she got evicted for being tasteless and she spent the rest of her life with us in the garage. How could I have thrown her away? How could I not have made just a little more room in my heart for Lamp Lady? We all have our regrets and throwing away Lamp Lady is one of mine.

Who can explain the attraction to something like the Big Metal Chicken or the Lamp Lady? What is about them? They are so much larger than life. Just one increment beyond good taste, maybe? Or maybe so many levels beyond taste that it falls into the whimsey category. Could Michelangelo have gone just one flourish too far and left the Sistine Ceiling to be the butt of laughter?

Sometimes the world gets entirely too serious and big metal chickens or lamp ladies step up to the plate and let us enjoy ourselves without really knowing how or why. To be honest, I wouldn't want to live with Lamp Lady but --oh, how she made my life special while she was here.

Being God's Helper

2011-08-09T16:28:00.003-05:00

I’ve been part of a bible study at the local drug and alcohol rehab for women for several years now. It’s called Morgan’s Mercy Mansion but most of us just call it the Mansion. It's run by an independent Pentecostal church here in town. And it’s such an interesting blend of women that I talk about it a lot here.

Briefly, the bible study is usually about evenly divided with around 12 women from the Mansion and 12 other women from the mainline denominations in town, being mostly Baptists, Methodists, Christians, and Presbyterians. You couldn’t ask for a more diverse group of different ages and beliefs. We have some lively bible discussions.

I fell in love with the rehab center and the ladies who come and go for a six month stay. So I started going to their Thursday morning prayer meeting.

There are always prayers for patience to stick out the six-month program, for favor from various county judicial systems and child custody cases and for reconciliation within families. And then there are prayers for the smallest things that are so often taken for granted. Yesterday we prayed for toilet paper.

I have seen their prayers answered abundantly and vividly for both large requests and small. Money is always tight at the Mansion. One day they had been running low on money and food. And the ladies hadn’t had any meat for a few days. So they prayed and asked God to send them some hamburger meat. Before the day was over someone from their church had called and donated steaks. Ever since that day I have called them "the ladies who prayed for hamburger and got steak.”

Well, we’ve been praying for a dentist for a couple of years now.

A good majority of the ladies at the rehab are in their 20’s when their wisdom teeth start giving them trouble. Then there’s always one woman who has missing teeth from an abusive boyfriend, car accidents or just neglect. And most of the women don’t have dental insurance or money or, sometimes, even family.

Last Wednesday I went to the dentist for my regular check up. I am big on routine checkups. It was a routine mammogram that caught a cancerous lump in my breast. Caught it early enough that the treatment was almost routine and saved me a LOT of drama, possibly even saved my life. Routine checkups catch stuff before it has time to get big and ugly. I am all about routine checkups now.

Now--the thing about getting your teeth cleaned is that only the hygienist gets to talk. During one of the short spit breaks, I had asked about the pond that you can see from their window, so she was telling me how the dentist got a good deal on solar film for the windows by exchanging dental work.

At the next spit break I asked if they ever did free dental work for people with no money. When she told me that, yes, they do a lot of it, I sat up and started talking. The rest of the conversation fell right into place and by the very next morning when I walked into the Mansion for our regular prayer time, the staff greeted me with excitement they could barely contain and the news that “Bridgett is at the dentist!"

Seldom has just one sentence brought me such a good feeling. I felt so used. Most of the time you hear this phrase in a negative way, like: a boyfriend uses you to get what he wants not for your own benefit. Or your employers use you to get what they want. But when God uses you it’s a totally different feeling. I am certain that God used me to connect the need and the solution. The only question I have is why God didn’t just do it Herself instead of going through people. It certainly would have been easier and more organized.

I’m starting to appreciate that Christianity, when done correctly, is just a jumbled, messy, unorganized outfit that seldom makes sense. Christianity is a group experience.

Maybe God picked a writer to use knowing I would be here today with my fingers on the keyboard saying, “You wouldn’t believe what God did!”

I was only a set of ears taking in information, filtering it through my heart and sending words to my mouth when it was time for words. It only took one question and the ball started rolling. This was on Wednesday. Thursday morning Bridgett was at the dentist.

This morning I read something from one of my favorite blogs, RevGalBlogPals, an on-line preachers’ aid that usually has an interesting take on things. Here’s what someone wrote today:

I just got done reading Kate Braestrup's marvelous new book Beginner's Grace. In it, she tells a story of Mr. Roger's mom. First of all, don’t you feel better already, just thinking of Mr. Roger's mom? Anyway, in the book, Braestrup says that when Mrs. Rogers (Mom) would take Mr. Rogers (probably little Freddie in those days) to the movies, he would get disturbed by the pre-movie news reel. So much difficulty, death and destruction! Mrs. Rogers would tell him to "look for the helpers." If he looked, he could always find someone offering help, no matter how dismal the scene

God usually sends help in times of need. Sometimes you are an observer and sometimes you’re a helper. It feels good to be the humble helper.

Taking the Heat

2011-08-02T18:07:00.001-05:00

FYI: I have another blog I post to periodically. Today I tried the old frying an egg on the sidewalk. You can see for yourself if it worked: jane-reallycoolstuff.blogspot.com

I ran into an old friend yesterday at bible study. I’m really glad to see them settling into our neck of the woods. Her husband is a firefighter and I am always in need of a good fireman. Even though a fireman lives right across the road from us, I don’t suppose I’ll ever have too many of them around me. I almost suspect the county gives firemen a tax break to live close to me. I have a history.

When we bought this place it have never been inhabited that I know of. For the first few years we just came here to camp. It was cool to have our own private camp ground. There are three things you can’t do in a public campground: dig a hole, start a fire anywhere you want and pee on the ground. We did all three with abandon.

Eventually we brought out an old Lawnboy mower and started clearing off a small piece of our 23 acres. We worked that little mower so hard that we could have been a commercial for Lawnboy mowers. It did anything we asked it and lasted far longer that we ever thought it would. The place was so overgrown that we didn’t really know what we had. After our first year of clearing we were surprised to discover we had a creek. So we needed a bridge.

I married one of the most obsessive compulsive engineers God ever created. When Beaven builds something he doesn’t mess around. When it came time to deal with the creek he insisted on a bridge that would support a parade of elephants and last the ages. So we put down four 8X8 railroad ties to span the creek with 2X6 treated lumber as cross beams. Once we had this we could cross over onto the larger side of our land and continue clearing.

I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the cedars. They’re some of the nastiest, prickly, water-sucking trees around. About the only thing they’re really good for is to provide shelter for birds and to burn in campfires. And even the campfires are an iffy proposition. Cedar logs put out a snap, crackle and pop that can be amusing at night but sometimes they make a small explosion that sends hot coals onto your clothes or body parts. I have many a sweatshirt with a burn hole in it from the cedar. The cedars were the first trees to go. I wanted to make room for the few pines we had, to nourish them, love them and encourage their lives.

In the process of clearing out cedars one hot August summer I had a huge pile of dead trees and decided the efficient thing would be to burn them. The mark of a good Girl Scout is being able to light a fire with one match. Well, that day I was very proud of myself because it just went up like crazy with one match. While I was standing there congratulating myself on what a great Girl Scout I was I noticed the fire was spreading. I tried to stomp it out but the flames were too hot to get close enough. I never noticed before how much hotter a fire is when you're wearing shorts. My Girl Scout troop had only camped in the winter. There wasn’t much wind, which was fortunate. It wasn't spreading very fast but it was definitely out of control. I ran to get Beaven.

I have noticed that Beaven’s response to most situations is to utilize the biggest tool he can find to fix the problem. So for this he got out our old Ford 8N tractor (a collector’s item but not much on firefighting). I'm not sure how he thought it was going to help but he drove the tractor over the grassfire for a few times while I was beating out the flames nearest our neighbors pasture. Finally I went to call the fire department.

My map skills are the worst in the world. Anyone who has ever been anywhere with me can tell you that. Add this to being in a total state of panic and my directions on how to get to our house were useless. I finally agreed to meet them at the gas station about three miles away.

Once they got to our house I was relieved to see they had a huge tank of water on the truck. There’s not exactly a fire hydrant in front of our place out here. They did pause at the edge of our bridge because they weren't sure if it would hold the fire truck. They stopped at the creek and said they couldn’t cross it. I told them it was sturdy bridge, that we had built it ourselves and his response was something like “Lady we have 2,000 gallons of water on this truck.” Then another fireman got out of the truck and looked under the bridge for a while and said it was worth a try. We held our breath. When they crossed safely, Beaven and I would have high-fived each other if our pasture wasn't burning up.

After the bridge test, the fire was a cakewalk. They drove around a little and sprayed water everywhere and it was out. They drove back across the bridge with confidence. I made huge glasses of iced tea for everyone and they put me on the donors list for the Volunteer Fire Department.

The interesting thing is that this grassfire gave out enough heat to germinate the pine seeds on the ground and, years later now, we've ended up with a tiny little forest of pines out of the deal. I got more pines in exchange for less cedars.

The next fire was smaller and I almost got it out by myself. This one burned out of control a little slower than the first one. But I had learned to act a bit faster. I ran into the house to get the fire extinguisher and Beaven looked up from his paper. "Nothing”, I told him, “I've got it under control.” By the time I gave up and called the fire department I just told them I'd meet them at the gas station this time. But you could see the flames from down the road so they might have been able to find it even without my directions.

By the third fire we had graduated to a riding mower. And this time, I swear it wasn't my fault. It was another hot and dry day. I was only mowing. Mowing. How can you start a fire while you're mowing, for God's sake? Beaven deliberated long and hard over whether awesome Thanksgiving meals were really enough reason to stay married to me. That evening he told me the red hot muffler on the riding mower had probably caught the tall dry grass on fire. It really wasn’t my fault.

Whatever.

I was riding along minding my own business and all of a sudden I was in the middle of a circle of flames all around the mower. I jumped off before the thing exploded or whatever gas engines do when they catch fire. And this time I went straight to the phone. After a few sentences of explaining who I was and where I lived the dispatcher handed me the final insult, "Yeah, lady, we know where you live."

Now the reason Beaven says I've set fire to the place four times, not three, like there's really any difference between the numbers, and who wants to keep count, anyway, is that the guys had to come out a second time for this fire. The fire started at the edge of our land and moved onto the neighbor’s place. Where we are grass and meadow they are all old oaks and thick decaying underbrush. Once a fire gets in that kind of terrain there's no telling how long it can smolder only to burst into flames later.

We had sent the firemen home after another round of huge glasses of iced tea and more profuse thanks. We took some time to look at the mower. The wheels had melted so we decided to wait until the next day to tow it off. We had even gone in and had nice relaxing showers ourselves. We were about to go out to eat for a little celebratory post-fire dinner. It had become a tradition of sorts. We went out to make one last check of the blackened pasture and off in the distance we saw the bright orange flames.

This time the fire dept didn't mess around. They brought in a bulldozer and cut a dirt line that encompassed the fire and then some. I can't remember exactly if they did the helicopter with the bucket of water thing. I know there was talk of doing that. You'd think I would remember a thing like that.

I had some small vindication a couple of years ago when I was living in Mississippi working on the Katrina recovery. There was a huge grass fire across the road. Yes, on somebody else’s land. Even better--the fireman’s land. Beaven sent me photos and I sent around a mass email to family insisting I was totally out of the state and could not be blamed.

I still get a knot in my stomach whenever I see orange and black colors together. You can imagine what Halloween is like for me.

Going into the Deep End

2011-07-26T16:01:00.001-05:00

Forgive me if my brilliance is not up to par today. I’ve got a lot of things bouncing around in my brain and I’m feeling rushed. It’s kind of like when I worked and had a REAL JOB and things would pile up on my desk and when I sifted through them I would usually find a scrap of paper near the bottom of the pile, yellowed with age, that read “Do this tomorrow or else.”

We have a funeral this afternoon here in Winnsboro and I’m cooking a casserole and a cake. Also one of the grands is coming for the week and I have to batten down the hatches. Plus I’ve lost my iPod which is the only reason to ever get into a car so the whole shopping thing has been delayed and we are out of popcorn. This alone is an emergency of the highest proportions around here. And did I mention that our pond has dried up and all our fish are dead? You can imagine what our yard smells like. I’m feeling very scattered.

Usually I spend more time getting all the words to line up when I write here. And, actually, that’s what I wanted to talk about today.

There is a new book out that I’m really enjoying: The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. The subtitle is “What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.” I’m only about a third of my way through it and already think this is an idea ripe for discussion. In fact, a corollary of this subject came to me years ago during one of my “theme reads.”

I went through a two or three year obsession with Lewis and Clark that led into a simultaneous obsession with Thomas Jefferson. I read everything I could find on the subjects. This led into a whole American Revolution, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin theme-read.

Part of my fascination with these revolutionary fathers was because their lifestyles were so different from my own yet they are who I am. They created the country I live in. And it wasn’t so long ago but it was. People travelled by horseback and ate food cooked over a fire. When the sun went down it got dark and they went to bed because they couldn’t see.

In the midst of my crush on the founding fathers I decided to spend an entire evening just the way people in the 18th century lived—only an evening. All I had to do was read a bit and go to bed. I thought just an evening would be a snap but it was a real eye-opener. It took 12 candles before I could really see well enough to read by candlelight. But this made the room hot so I abandoned the idea. I tried to assemble the ingredients for a snack and almost caught my hair on fire looking in the back of a cabinet while holding a candle. I thought of listening to music but that involved electricity. There was just nothing to do but think.

I think modern people have forgotten how to think. We spend more time “doing” than we spend thinking about what we’re going to “do.” If you’re looking for a reason everything in the world seems to be going to hell in a hand basket, this might be a clue.

The Shallows talks more about how our brains have changed by modern technology although I don’t pay much attention to how my brain works. But I think civilization has inevitably changed our thinking habits over the years. The book describes how humans had to first invent a language to communicate, then a written language, then something to write on, then books. And every time we came up with something new our brains re-wired themselves. That’s about as far as I have gotten in the book so I can’t say if he is going to cover one of my own theories: The way we write and compose has changed due to the editing features of electronic word processing. And this, in turn, has changed the way we think.

I don’t have to think very far in advance when I write. I put a bunch of words on the screen then I re-arrange them, delete some and add others. Eventually I get them in the order I like. My thinking has become quite fluid and “on the fly.” So, here’s my question: When the process by which I arrive at thoughts changes, does the message change also? Without the internal tempering of our ideas, a maturation process generated in the privacy of one’s own mind, do those ideas greet the public prematurely--before they have seasoned and deepened, before they are well-rounded and complete?

We do a lot of stuff nowadays without much preparation.

Before Lewis and Clark left Missouri to explore the Northwest Passage they had to Prepare. They would have no contact with home until they returned. Indeed, when they returned home three years later everybody was surprised to see them. They had been gone so long people assumed they had died.

So, before they left they had to think things through. This is becoming almost a novel idea today. They had to pack everything they would need for the expedition, from medicines to bullets and even writing paper, knowing they wouldn’t be able to buy certain things en route. They had few ideas of what they would encounter. Jefferson gave them general directions on how to treat any Native Americans they might encounter (Be friendly but firm.) Other than that, they were on their own. They couldn’t phone Jefferson for advice. They couldn’t send for reinforcements or extra blankets.

Contrast that with today when you go to the store for groceries and you call home a couple of times to be reminded of what you plan to buy then have another couple of conversations there in the store on what size box of cereal to buy. You can even take a photograph of a package and send it home to see if you’re buying the right package. You have the luxury of not having to plan ahead.

The main thing that fascinated me about writers like Jefferson and Franklin was how deeply thought out their words were by the time they reached paper. No spell check, no editing features. No word count, Thesaurus, or auto correct.

And this is where my real point is. It’s one point The Shallows hasn’t made in the first third of the book that I’ve read so far: How much different must these writers have thought in order to have the completed thought in their heads before anything went on paper? I can’t assemble more than a few sentences in my mind let alone remember them long enough to get the complete set of words to paper.

When Jefferson was given the assignment to write the Declaration of Independence he thought it through before he even picked up his quill pen. There weren’t any wadded up balls of paper littering his floor when he changed what he wanted to say. Paper was too precious. He thought it through, edited it in his head, re-worked it, changed a few words, moved paragraphs around. Then and only then, he wrote it down.

To my knowledge there is only one copy of the Declaration of Independence with editing marks from Adams’ and Franklin’s input. The greatest written paper in the history of our country, an international classic, and most of the editing was done inside Thomas Jefferson’s mind.

I’d love to know what was going on inside his mind. It must have been a red, white and blue explosion of synapses firing from dawn to sunset. And probably even after dark. He had probably mastered the art of thinking that I have yet to find.

The night I spent without artificial light may have been too short of an experiment. Maybe we all need to spend some time, maybe a lot of time, in the dark—just thinking. Turning off the spigot and holding the thoughts for a while to let them age and ferment, deepen with a little rest.

We could all do with putting a little more thought into what we say and do.

Junior High Jubilee

2011-07-19T10:07:00.004-05:00

OK, so – I was gone a week. I went with the junior high kids to camp. I always love going places with the youth. You would think a week of non-stop dancing and walking and eating camp food would help me lose a couple of pounds. But Noooooo.

If anything, the week proved I really need to lose a few pounds. I had trouble sitting down on the floor and getting up, which we did about a billion times a day. Every year it gets harder and I come home and promise myself and God that I will lose weight but the next summer rolls around and I haven’t done it. If they could just schedule summer vacation some other time when the weather was nicer I’d probably get out and exercise before I went to camp. I suggest November. That a nice pleasant month.

My biggest concern before I even left my house was the bridge. Mo Ranch is divided by the Guadalupe River. It’s not much of a river this summer but somehow has managed to carve out a pretty spectacular swath of river bottom so it is far below the rest of the camp. Since the river divides the camp you are always going from one end of the camp to the other. There is a foot bridge for this. Sounds pretty innocent, doesn’t it? “foot bridge”

This picture doesn’t really do it justice. The little roofy thing is the half-way point so you’re only seeing half of the bridge. And did I mention you can see straight through the wire mesh floor to the ground?

How tall do you guess this is? Based on the SUV driving under it, it must be somewhere between 600 feet and a mile high.

Did I mention I am scared of heights? I’m not scared of snakes, bugs, mice, spiders or Glenn Beck. But anything over 6 feet in the air scares the Bejesus out of me. One day years ago I climbed on the roof of our house for some reason and had a panic attack that led me to lie flat on my stomach with my arms outstretched holding to the roof for dear life. After a while I realized I couldn’t stay there forever. I pictured all my neighbors coming home from work and seeing me up there hanging on to the shingles like I loved my house so much I was hugging it. Plus there was no telling what my children were doing inside the house unsupervised. I can’t remember how I got down.

I’ve been to Mo Ranch before and know there is a way you can drive your car down, around and up and avoid walking across the bridge. But the difference this time was this was a youth event and the whole camp would be walking everywhere in groups. Plus I was with my granddaughter. Nobody wants to look like a frail, sad, ‘fraidy cat in front of their granddaughter. I knew I would be faced with that bridge several times a day. And I was going to have to find a way to cross it.

Then, just like God knew what was going on inside my head, the THEME scripture for the week was Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength.” I was definitely screwed.

I set upon mumbling this to myself like a mantra, hoping it would sink in and I would actually believe it.

The first time I went across I held on to the rails and stared straight ahead while Beaven pointed out all the things I should be looking at on the ground and any fool will tell you right off the bat to never look down. The second time Sarah was with me and I held her hand like I was protecting her while we both knew it was the other way around. Another time I was walking with someone who was telling me a great story and it helped take my mind off my funeral plans and whether you could have an open casket after falling a thousand feet into a dry river bed.

I realized if I had something to distract me it helped. So, on the next crossing I asked Beaven to explain the Pythagorean Theorem to me and tried to work out the hypotenuse of a set of stairs with 65 steps and a rise of 7” per step.

I managed to go across that bridge a total of six times during the week. Thankfully, as the week went on I found myself traveling with bigger groups of people and the group took a different path that involved a bridge but a much smaller and lower one. That made things a LOT better and I could set my mind on all the other things that were interesting about the week.

Like sharing a room with 50 junior high school girls. That’s an experience.

Please believe me when I say this was just the beginning. By the end of the week there must have been 25 hair appliances to straighten, curl or dry your hair. Plus cans and jars of every beauty product sold. All for young ladies who will never again be as naturally beautiful as they are right now in their bloom.

The only other things I want to show you today are a couple of videos.

The bridge wasn’t the only high thing to enjoy. They had a slide that used a wooden carrier that went on tracks down (like a roller coaster) and went straight into the river. I’ve never seen anything like it outside Mo Ranch.

They also have an outstanding ropes course but I forgot to take my camera. What is it about this place and heights? I think they have a whole “Nearer My God to Thee” thing going on at this camp.

Here’s a shot of my group putting a hula hoop pyramid together. The object of the challenge is to look at the pyramid for a while. Then the leader kicks it apart and tells you to replicate the shape. And times you. The challenge has been around long enough now that most kids know the technique. I also knew the high school record was 1.7 seconds. Our group kept at it until we managed to do it in 1.692.

Where did all this lead to at the end of the day? Vespers and staring up at a few constellations not faded by a magnificent full moon. The awe of lying on your back looking up at the sky. Absolute awe.

It’s hard to find anything to bring awe to your life nowadays. We’ve managed to fly to the moon and back. We have electronic communication that puts the world in your living room. We have microscopes that can show us individual atoms. We can examine our DNA and find out which continent our earliest relatives sprouted from. Even the pre-teen set is powerful beyond ancient kings and emperors.

When all is said and done at the end of the day we are left with the same sky Jesus gazed at. We are left with questions only He had answers to. We lay there looking at the moon and wondered where it all begins and ends. There is something out there bigger than anything we can imagine. And the Creator of all of it loves us.

Being Presbyterian

2011-07-06T10:08:00.010-05:00

I hope the title of this blog won't send my Baptist readers off to another blog before they read me today. Wait....I'm not sure I have any Baptist readers. I'm not even sure I know that many Baptists. Whatever. Be forewarned. I will speak of Presbyterians today. Hang around if you dare.

I've never known any other life. As far back as I can trace my family we are Presbyterians.  The family bible, going back to the 1880's speaks of someone getting married in the"kirk" in Missouri. Kirk is the Scottish word for church. Yes, Scot Presbyterian. I married a Lutheran who quickly and without much thought became Presbyterian. His father was full-blooded German, as was my mother. We are totally and purely White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

This is not to say we are closed-minded about it. Presbyterians are very open to other ways of worship and relationships with the Creator. And I'm one of the most open-minded. Liberal. In fact, I am very nominally Presbyterian. I could probably be a Quaker if they had them out here in the East Texas woods.

But last week with July 4th it was positively patriotic to be Presbyterian if you read your history. The British referred to the Revolutionary War as the Presbyterian Revolt. The only minister to sign the Declaration of Independence was John Witherspoon, a Presbyterian. I could go on and on.

So I will.

Next week 300 or so Presbyterian high school youth will descend on Tulsa, Oklahoma for my favorite week of the year. Alas, I won't be with them. I found another gig. The middle schoolers will be at a different camp in central Texas, my granddaughter included. So that's where I will be energizing and playing. I've only traded one Presbyterian event for another.

If you're still with me after all those boring details let me make a confession.. I don't really have much of a blog today. We've had a whirlwind two weeks filled with other events. One neighbor moved out. I cleared out the balance of their debris via a long distance request. ("I don't care what you do with it, just get rid of it.") Another neighbor moved in. We spent some time making friends with each other. This took some time as they have four kids, 2 dogs, 2 goats, 2 geese, and a whole flock of chickens, including a rooster. That is the one sound that has been missing out here in paradise: the sound of a rooster crowing. I think we will enjoy each other.

Inspired by all that moving, I cleaned out our storage building. In the process I realized my daughter's 40th birthday is coming up and I wanted to give her the journal I kept when she was born. But we've got about 40 boxes of "stuff" and I can't find the journal.

You can see I've been too busy for any smidge of wit or wisdom to find me. So I decided to refer you to some of my own favorite blogs so at least you'd have something interesting to read even if it didn't come from me.

And, to my great surprise, I found out they're all Presbyterian. I swear I did not know that about them before I started reading them. Maybe that says Presbyterians have more interesting lives.  Whatever. Here they are. I've got to get out to the storage building before it gets too hot.

Momastery will make you laugh, cry and/or think. Ree Drummond will make you want to cook (and buy her book.)

I swear I didn't find them by our common ecclesiastical design.  They became my favorites before I knew this about them. Go read them this morning. I'm off to go through more boxes.

Oh, wait! Here's one that I think may not be Presbyterian:

http://thebloggess.com/2011/06/and-thats-why-you-should-learn-to-pick-your-battles/

However, she just might be Presbyterian.  Not my grandmother's kind, but surely a good candidate. We would take her at our church.

Don't look for a blog next week because there's no signal at Mo Ranch. I'll be back in two weeks with what I learned at camp.

July 4th Food

2011-06-30T08:23:00.006-05:00

Our family is the kind that starts planning for a holiday meal about a month ahead. You might think we suffered from lack of food in our past, like maybe somebody had been in a concentration camp, but I'm afraid not. We just love to eat. Given a touch of OCD in our genetic makeup, we just look forward to Festive Food and plan way far ahead. Food is the centerpiece of our family gatherings. Some families eat a few bites of turkey and go outside to play touch football. Please. We don't even watch sports on TV.

I sent out a general alert to our daughters yesterday because I won't be in Dallas in time to get the hotdogs. And that is the reason for this bonus post: I've got the info on the best hot dogs you'll ever eat on my food blog this week. I plan to make a red, white and blue cake: tres leches with strawberries and blueberries. We'll roast some corn. Buy a watermelon and some canteloupe.

Normally, we all meet here at my house and blow up a bunch of fireworks. We don't usually have a lot of pesky restrictions about fireworks out here in the boondocks. Our favorite fireworks stand usually sets up on the parking lot at Joe Bob's gas station. However, we've had so little rain that we're under a burn ban. Every single county in Texas is under a burn ban. I think somebody said they've declared the entire state of Texas a disaster zone. I could make a snarky political jab right here but I know you didn't come here for that. Anyway, we won't get to blow anything up at our house. We did get a trampoline so you might say we'll be launching children into the air.

Eat Red, White and Blue this holiday, my friends. Thank God for Washington, Jefferson, Adams and all our founding fathers. Find some John Phillip Sousa on your iPod. Jaywalk somewhere. Celebrate your freedom. Celebrate the fact that I could say snarky things about our government and get away with it.

Summer Reading

2011-06-28T16:54:00.007-05:00

This is the time of year my friend Susan sends out a request for summer reading. Then she compiles a list and sends that around. I haven't heard from her except photos on facebook that look suspiciously like she went ahead with her beach reading without us. Never one to be discouraged, I will add my own suggestions at the end of today's blog and invite your own recommendations. Who needs to wait on Susan?

However, I've also got another fun way to read: Group Reading. I think I may have invented this.  You get a group of people who are all dying to read the same book and everyone reads it at the same time. It’s not a race. It’s not a club where someone reports on the book later. It’s just a community of people doing the same thing at the same time, sharing the experience with each other.

I think my first Group Read was the final Harry Potter book. Never in the history of humanity has a book ever been so anticipated. I ordered a copy from Amazon and was promised it would be in my mailbox on the release date. But I still couldn’t wait for the mail. Our mail doesn't get here until around 3 in the afternoon. So I went into town that morning and bought a copy anyway. Addictions are so sad to watch so please pretend I didn't confess that last bit of info.

And, of course, my pre-ordered copy arrived right on time as promised so I ended up with two copies.

Then Steve and Emily brought a few copies of their own. Steve's family was here from Ohio and they came to spend the weekend with us.  It seems like we ended up with about ten people and almost as many copies of Harry Potter. I have no idea where everyone slept but everyone wanted to read Harry Potter.

We commenced to read.

We agreed on one thing from the beginning: No one could give away the slightest detail of what they read. Periodically someone would gasp and everyone would ask what page they were on. Page 64 I remember as particularly distressing. Our other daughter was back in Garland reading and would periodically call on the phone, “Oh, God, just wait until you get to page 127!” Page numbers became our language.

I think Elizabeth finished first because she didn’t have a houseful of company to feed or act polite for. Then, gradually, people in my house finished and sneaked off to talk about the book to each other, whispering details and comparing opinions.

Group Reading is rooted in my experience doing curfew duty as a youth leader. Anytime you get a bunch of high school people they always have some burning need to communicate with each other after they get into their rooms at night. This issue has almost dissolved since the invention of cell phones but you still get one or two who need to pop out of their room and run down the hall to discuss something of major importance, usually having to do with the opposite sex.   The adults take hall duty after lights out to keep everyone in the correct room. Otherwise nobody gets any sleep.

Hall duty always reminded me of fishing. You sit patiently and are usually rewarded by catching someone bolt out the door for a friend’s room about thirty minutes into the curfew. I love to watch their expression when they throw the door open and lunge out only to stop in mid-step when they see me sitting there in the middle of the hall with a smile on my face.

Most of us usually took a book to read while we sat for the hour until things calmed down enough that we could go to sleep ourselves. In those late evenings comparisons of our reading material we found most of us love to read the Janet Evanovich books. She always has one come out in the summer just a couple of weeks before Synod starts.

So we started a Group Read. Reading would commence at Lights Out on the first day of the week. We compare notes as we passed each other in the hall or in the back of the room doing the few slivers of time where our supervision of the kids is blissfully nominal, “How far have you gotten”? “Has she blown up the car yet?”

There are two things you can always depend on reading a Janet Evanovich book: Stephanie Plum, the heroine, always gets her car destroyed in some hilarious way. It is only a matter of when. And you have to be careful where you read the books. You can’t read them in public because you usually end up laughing out loud.

In fact, one of my most unique group reads I've ever been part of was on a plane when I heard a women two rows up start laughing. The stewardess was walking down the aisle and asked if it was the new Stephanie Plum book. We ended up with about three rows of passengers plus the stewardess talking about the books and comparing notes.

Group reading has no purpose. I think maybe it’s just being part of a community.

It can get a little competitive without really trying. When I room with the camp nurse at Synod she is usually able to finish before I do because she spends a lot of time in the waiting room at the ER while I’m busy leading a small group.

This year I won’t be at the Synod Youth Workshop but I will be at a different youth event the same week. We’re going to try a group read for both events. I expect a lot of updates on facebook. You can join us. We commence at Lights Out on Monday: 11pm on July 11th.

I have my copy already. Dana got one autographed for me when Evanovich was in Dallas last week.

Here's my suggestions for your summer reading.

The Help (Start with this one so you can be finished before the movie comes out.)

Breakfast with Buddah (was on the clearance table at Sam's but is a great read.

George W's book. Not bad at all. He explains the New Orleans deal

Water for Elephants....then go see the movie. It doesn't disappoint

Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert (She marries the guy from Eat, Pray, Love)

Try a pair Sue Monk Kidd's books: start with When the Heart Waits then immediately read Travelling with Pomegranets. In fact, if you have a college age or recent graduate daughter, the Travelling book is a MUST. Get two copies and do your own group read.

I've enjoyed Kate Braestrup's books this year: Here If You Need Me and there's another one I can't remember the title

and finally, Being Dead Is No Excuse - a guide to funeral food in the South by Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Mays

Happy Reading!

Clean Water U

2011-06-21T15:13:00.004-05:00

I first heard of Living Waters for the World about three years ago on our annual trip to Guatemala. We visited a couple of churches who had recently installed systems. The next year, we saw even more. Then last year, we knew one of our sister church in Dallas was sending a team to install a system and we watched them in action during the week. And I was hooked.

Then the guys from that installation came by our church to show the men of the church how the system works. And Beaven was hooked.

So we registered and packed and set off for what I like to call Grown-Up Camp. My theory is that no one ever outgrows the fun of going off for a week to meet new people, learn new things and eat camp food. A good opportunity to lose a little weight.

On our way to Camp Hopewell in Oxford, Mississippi we took a quick detour through Memphis to check on Elvis (He’s still dead.) and the Sun records studio (which is still alive-- They continue to record music there sometimes.)

Living Waters for the World, just in case you didn’t link on the above like you were supposed to, is a program of the Living Waters Presbytery. They started out in the early 90's installing water purification systems in underdeveloped countries. After a few years of wearing themselves out doing so many installations they realized they could teach others how to do it. And that’s how Clean Water U began.

We were kept busy from breakfast to bedtime. We didn’t have a single hour of unplanned time until Thursday just before dinner and even that was a mistake of sorts. We were supposed to have two hour-long presentations that afternoon but my group, who was quite rebellious, took only ten minutes for our presentation, giving the whole camp some much appreciated free time. Naps, anyone?

They teach three basic classes: The one that goes by the title “101” teaches people (me in this case) how to test water, evaluate the possibility of installing a system and plan a trip. The 102 class was to learn how to teach health and hygiene to the communities who will be using the water. And the 103 class taught you how to install a standard water treatment system using either ozone or ultra violet rays to disinfect the water. There are also two other more detailed components for more sophisticated systems like solar powered and reverse osmosis.

Sorry about that “reverse osmosis” part. Wake up and let’s continue. I’ll try not to do that again.

One of the guys in my group called it the “lawyer’s class.” Our instruction material included a whole CD of spreadsheets evaluating sustainability and cost effectiveness and a bunch of other dry but extremely helpful material. The disk had formulas, drop down menus and tables with information on current cost of materials or the latest health information. It was a bit intimidating. It was also the best collection of resources I’ve ever seen. I asked at one point if the CD was dummy-proof, if I could mess it up, and was reassured that I couldn’t. We’ll see.

We had ten people in our class and somehow around Tuesday we acquired a habit of spontaneously muttering “blah; blah, blah” very softly and gently while any of our three instructors was speaking. It had a lilting cadence to it. It reminded me of the seagulls in Finding Nemo who would claim, “Mine…Mine…Mine." No one remembers who started it, when or why. Any one of us might start and the rest would chime in as an act of solidarity. I could hear my mother rolling in her grave. I’m pretty sure we sounded disrespectful but nothing was farther from the truth. I think the “blah, blah” was to either indicate that we got the point or possibly that we had reached information overload. To be honest, I can’t say why we did it. I am smart enough to know that an inside joke is only funny to those people who are inside. I just know we felt so much better afterwards. No disrespect intended. Honest.

It was a very information-packed, overwhelming class.

Beaven took 103, which was the Installation component. He can now put together and take apart a system that will filter the water then kill any bacteria using Ozonation. Other systems use Ultra Violet light and still others use Reverse Osmosis. Oops.

The main challenge for these students is not how to assemble the system. The challenge is instructing someone else how to do it. And through a translator. In short, to stay “hands off” and just instruct. The in-country people will have to know their system well enough to maintain it after we leave.

Living Waters for the World had a solar powered water system in Haiti that survived the earthquake. I heard the story of how the Haitian guy in charge of operating the system dug through the rubble to get the system back up and running. In the aftermath of any disaster safe water is always the most crucial element in the community. Solar power meant they weren't dependent on electrical lines. There were a lot of teams at camp who were bound for Cuba and Haiti.

The most interesting thing both of these classes did was test the lake water at the camp. You take a water sample and add to it a medium that is basically “bacteria food.” The water started out kind of yellow gold. Within 48 hours it had turned a frightening black. And it also smelled to high heaven. This showed the water had harmful bacteria in it.

When it was time to dispose of it, it had become positively toxic and we were warned not to participate if we had any kind of cut on our hands. Before you pour it out you kill the bacteria by adding bleach to the water which almost immediately turned clear again but was not safe to drink. Scary stuff.

Beaven and I both want to try this on our own pond water. Not sure what we’ll do if it shows up dangerous. We never drink out of the pond, anyway.

The third component is the Educators’ class, 102. They had as many cool toys as the installation guys. Maybe more. While the installation people have pipe cutters and Swiss Army knives, the educators have laminated posters, cloth banners, stuffed animals, skits, songs, and science project-worthy experiments on germs. Their job on a trip is to teach the community teachers then assist in a second class while the new teachers teach the community.

“Always and only for drinking, cooking, brushing teeth and washing the baby”—I heard this so many times; including one song sung in Spanish, that it became a mantra for the weekend. I was a little confused by the “always and only” part until the message settled in. “Always” because it takes only one germ to make you sick. You can never let your guard down. And “only” because clean water is so precious that you wouldn’t want to waste it on something stupid like washing the car in it. Like we do here in the US.

We forget because it is so easy here. We wash our car in drinking water. We water the lawn with it. We bathe in it. In the United States we flush our toilets with water pure enough to drink.

Everything you do at Living Waters for the World is geared to helping a community become self-sustaining within three years. By that time, a community should be able to make enough money from selling water to pay for the cost of running the system.We had a spreadsheet to calculate that. The teachers should have educated the community on the importance of healthy water and how to use it. The installation guys should have taught the in-country people how and when to change the filters.

Worship was wonderful. We met twice a day, morning and evening, to sing and reflect. The chapel at the camp is the original anti-bellum St Andrews Presbyterian Church. The paint-peeling walls were thick pine boards. The floor was pine. Even the ceiling was wooden tongue-in-groove slab. This provided fantastic acoustics. It was a little like being inside the sound box of a fine guitar. Our group of about 40 fit the chapel perfectly and the sound flowed over us like a gentle rain. We usually had the windows opened and the staff told us this was good so that we could hear the outside world of campers doing energizers on one side of us and the lawn mowers on the other side. The real world became part of our worship.

The worship on the last morning included communion. Wil Howie poured the grape juice into a clear goblet then added some of the water from the camp lake that had been cleaned by the system. Water that was now clear, clean and gloriously healthy. That’s when it hit me. Jesus used wine for the Last Supper because the water was not safe.

I had long ago heard that in Jesus' time wine was commonly drunk not to get a buzz or for the taste but so that the alcohol could kill the germs in the water. After spending whole week learning about water I had come to appreciate a cool clear drink of safe water. Surely, Christ would have used that instead of wine if it had been available to him. What is more basic than bread and water? Wine must have been his fall-back drink when he couldn’t serve water.

I will never think of communion the same again.

The elements sat on a table covered by a cloth map of the world. As we walked up to take communion by intinction we were to take a stone and place it on the country we had a connection with. I laid my stone on Guatemala then stopped to take in the whole map. I was at the end of the line and the stones had all been placed. A small pile of stones on Guatemala, some on Haiti and some on Cuba, the Yucatan Peninsula and other Mexican spots. A few others on other countries. But so much of the cloth was still empty! Not because they didn’t need the water. But because their country was in such turmoil that it wasn’t safe to travel there. Or because the place was so remote it was almost impossible to get there. And there are also places where the water is so bad that our systems won't help. The map was showing us needs that were unmet.

I felt very sad looking at the flat spaces with no stones. I touched them with my hand trying to soothe them with my fingers because that was all I could do.

We have so many resources in our country--enough that we have love and strength left over to give to others. But I thought of the places in the world my love cannot reach. And all I could do was touch their empty outline on a cloth map and pray.

When the week is finished, when all is said and done, it always comes back to prayer. That is all we are ever left with. Prayer.

Summer Camp for Adults

2011-06-14T18:29:00.000-05:00

I'm spending the week at Living Water U. Beaven is learning how to install a water treatment system and I'm learning how to put a trip together. Right now, I'm hot and tired. Go read the post about water from last week. I'll have a wordy and eloquent post this time next week. If I post earlier I'll put a note on facebook. See you then.

Worship African Style

2011-06-08T09:45:00.147-05:00

What was I thinking?

I messed up with today's post by over looking one of the most astounding worship services our congregation has ever had. So I'm posting a second set of words about it. It was like summer was coming and they needed to throw in every idea anyone's had and left unused all year long. Clearing the slate, so to speak, to get ready for low attendance while everyone goes on vacation, mission trips and camp during the summer.

I seriously doubt that was the case if only because we're not that organized at the First Presbyterian Church in Garland, Texas. I like to think maybe God had a hand in it. But it was a total hodgepodge of worship styles, a smorgasbord of all things spiritual. And a smashing success. We were limp afterwards.

For music we had the Kinder Choir of three, four & five year olds not only singing but banging on the marimba, sometimes with an older kid standing behind them to keep them from attacking each other with the mallets. Then we had the adult bell choir giving us an unplanned 90 second intermission while someone ran to find one of the ringers who we found out later thought he had time to run out for some fried chicken to contribute to the pot luck lunch after worship. I really couldn't tell there was a note or two missing from the song, it still sounded great. I'm not a musical person. Notes mean nothing to me.

The worship service was billed as "Children's Chapel style" to show the congregation what we do when we take the kids out of the adult service. We're trying to move from the established Children's Story where one adult with a microphone tells a story to the kids who go back to their pew afterwards and have to sit still during the sermon. What we've introduced to take it's place is Childrens Chapel and I am almost foaming at the mouth over how great this new idea is.

For one thing, we have a small chapel sitting right there across the Narthex that is the perfect size for the kids. The children start worship in the Sanctuary with their family. They stay for the Passing of the Peace, music and other introductory activities. When it comes time for the scripture reading, the kids gather at the Chancel and leave for the Chapel. There they do all the same things the adults are doing across the hall, they're just doing it all on their own level and with their own special energy.

They have a prayer of illumination, sing a song, read scripture from The Message, then have a sermon in the form of a skit, craft or discussion. Then we have another song, write down names of people we want to pray for (the pieces of paper become our offering), say the Lords Prayer with motions and then go back to resume worship with their families. Everything is timed perfectly so the kids are ready to return to the Sanctuary just as the ushers take the offering up to the chancel. And one of the kids walks with the adult ushers to take the Chapel offering. The first time I saw children usher in their offering alongside the adults I got it. This is truly worship.

It is one of the most stupendous uses of children's energies and imagination that I've ever seen.

Last Sunday's sermon that we shared with the adults was a skit about when Jesus ascended to heaven and the disciples were left looking up at the sky. We learned to look for Jesus, not in the clouds, but in everyday life. While we are waiting for Jesus we can help friends who are lost or share your lunch with someone who is hungry.

And, just in case you think the kids don't pay attention to anything in church, I couldn't remember a lot about the sermon just now and had to ask my grandkids who remembered it all, right down to the fine details.

However, last Sunday-- being our hodge-podge worship, we had the most unusual offering ever in the mdist of this already new and different worship style. Are you ready for me to describe it? I'll wait while you get another cup of coffee. Rest up and fasten your seat belt.

We've had an influx of new members from Cameroon. Cameroon, like Guatemala, has a strong Presbyterian presence, thanks to all those missionaries from years ago. Most of our new members are first generation immigrants but multi-generations Presbyterians. Divine Kuja's father is a Presbyterian pastor. Once Divine and Mercy Kuja and Rosa Befedi-Mengue became comfortable and accepted by our congregation they started inviting friends. And the friends who were already worshipping at another church in Dallas found out that our church is closer to where they live so they've been moving their memberships to Garland.

The mission committee figured it was time to celebrate this event, get to know our new members better and see if there was a way we could establish a relationship with Presbyterians in Cameroon. So we suggested collecting our offering "African style." And the way they take up an offering to God in Africa is by singing and dancing up the aisles to bring their contribution. They had been careful to wear traditional African robes on Sunday. They don't always do that. Mostly on special occasions like a baptism of one of their kids or a wedding or Easter. But Sunday our Sanctuary was alive with bright colors and prints. And dancing in the aisles.

The most interesting thing happened. My staid Presbyterian "Frozen Chosen" family saw how much fun the Africans were having dancing and they wanted to dance up the aisles, too. People who normally mail a check to the office once a month were scratching around for a bill or two that they could dance around and put in the plate. My granddaughter estimated the offering to be about three times the usual size.

The rest of church was kind of boring after that. I turned to an old friend who was visiting after moving away a couple of years ago and told her to "come back soon because we're going to handle snakes next."   She asked me if she needed to bring her own snake but sounded game for anything we wanted to do next. I think we're on to something here.

Afterwards, we all went into Fellowship Hall for a potluck lunch with standard Presbyterian casseroles next to African dishes like fried plaintains and spicy chicken dishes.

We had a chance to talk to our new members and find out a little bit about them. I can say "beautiful" in Lydia Tatang's language now. I got to spend some time visiting with her daughter-in-law. I found out what Theresia does for a living.

The mainline denominations are in flux all over this nation. Some Presbyterian churches are dying out. Some are merging with others when membership goes down. My congregation is one of the few to have grown in the last year. God has entrusted us with a surprise ministry in some people from Africa. And I think we're going to love it.

Since I posted two sets of words today you might want to keep going to read about Water.

Water

2011-06-07T20:49:00.022-05:00

I think I may have shot myself in the foot. Not literally—I know that people who live in Texas have a reputation for carrying guns around with us but I don’t have my concealed handgun license. That’s on my Bucket List but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

To phrase it differently, I think I may have done myself a disservice. I signed up to become part of a blog ring of like-minded writers. The ring is called RevGalBlogPals. It’s a group of female pastors, other church women and like-minded writers. They let me in for some of my more spiritual blogs.

I’m not sure they’ve read the other postings about how many times I’ve set the pasture on fire or how sometimes the parking lot of our Walmart smells like cow shit. Now I feel kind of obligated to write churchy things all the time. And curtail my use of the word “shit.”

Shot myself in the foot, for sure.

Beaven and I are packing up for the adult version of summer camp so I might be gone from the blogosphere next week if I can’t access the internet. We’re going to Living Waters University in Oxford, Mississippi to learn how to install water purification systems. We had so much fun managing a camp for the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance during the Katrina recovery we’ve been looking for a similar ministry ever since.

I’ve been going to Guatemala almost every year since 1999 and our group has developed a relationship with the Norte Presbytery there. Presbyterians are all about relationships. If you are writing a paper in a Presbyterian seminary and find yourself stumped for 20 more pages I always advise friends to throw in 20 pages on either Grace or Relationships and they’re usually OK.

But by visiting the same people every year you end up with a level of trust you can’t get in one visit alone. We have ten year’s experience of sitting in people’s homes and meeting their children. I’ve visited Miriam and Guilder where they work. I’ve walked in Ludin’s corn field and met the men who work for him. I’ve heard the story of how Guillermo and Loida met. And now, with facebook, I can read the notes Ligia sends to her mother to ask if she can babysit that night. And I got to be one of the first wave of people Sonia told she is to become a grandmother again. That is a relationship, friends.

Every time I visit Guatemala the first thing I get is a bottle of agua pura, bottled purified water. One of the first things I learned about visiting the country is that the water is dangerous to drink. This is the case in most poor countries. You don’t drink the tap water. You don’t brush your teeth with it. You don't wash your contacts with it. You don’t even open your mouth in the shower if you can help it. It only takes one little germ to start a roaring case of turista. Most people who live in countries like this have had dysentery once or twice. Those who can afford it, drink only bottled water but still end up sick once in a while.

Every trip I’ve taken to this beloved country has always resulted in at least one person on the trip getting sick. Veterans know they might get sick and they still go. I’ve avoided it more than others—I think I’ve really only been hit once or twice. My friend Linda usually gets sick every single year. But she has become an expert at how to handle traveler’s diarrhea; or as Linda calls it, "a bubbly tummy."

Our annual trip to Guatemala has evolved into a few standards like visiting the Children’s Nutrition Project we started years ago and still fund. And there is always one day we spend just driving around to different Presbyterian Churches. Sometimes we eat a meal with them but mostly we just drive by to refresh our memory with names and faces of people and churches we’ve met before.

Usually our visits have an advance team who talk to the church ahead of our visit. They explain that the gringos can’t handle the tap water, that it will make us sick. The church is always accommodating and makes sure everything is made with bottled water.

But one year, one tiny congregation didn’t get the word to use bottled water. We drove up to the church thinking it was a kind of “drive-by” visit where we’d only look out the van, snap a few pictures and keep going.

When we got to the tiny Bethel Presbyterian Church the whole congregation was waiting for us. In fact, we found out they had been waiting for three hours to meet us. The pastor made a little speech to say most of them had never even met a norte americano. Then the ladies brought out a refresco for us to drink. I took one look at the drink and the glasses and knew the church had not used agua pura to make the drinks. But they had been waiting for us. It would have been unthinkable to refuse their hospitality.

This is one of those situations that really defines people. I knew as sure as anything that if I drank that glass of refresco I would get sick. It was as simple as that.

I held the glass on my lap and took a few anemic sips. I decided this was the very situation the Confession of Sin was invented for and didn't touch the drink any further. My friend Linda, who was raised Lutheran and is much more gracious than I am, drank her whole glass. Finally, our Young Adult Volunteer took my glass from me. I heard later she drank the contents of my glass so that she could return an empty glass to the kitchen.

It was our last day in the country and most of us got home before we felt the full effects of the water. Linda got so sick she needed an IV for dehydration. The YAV who drank my glass in addition to her own ended up in the hospital. I told you it was serious stuff.

On our last two annual trips to Guatemala we visited churches that had recent Living Waters for the World installations. LWW is a program of the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) that trains people like Beaven and me to install and train communities how to care for the water system.

It works best to install a system in one of the churches in a community. The church will know the needs of the people and take better care of the equipment. When the system is installed in Christ’s name and used to His glory things just work out better.

Last year we were there for the dedication of the latest installation. This was a church congregation we already knew, old friends. We sang one of my favorite songs:

Gracias Senor por el dia tan lindo de hoy
Gracias Senor for la vida y la salud
Vengo, vengo a ti Senor
Vengo, vengo a ti Senor
Vengo yo a ti Senor expresar mi gratitude.

Thank you, God for a day as beautiful as today
Thank you, God, for life and health
We come to you, God
To show our gratitude.

I hear that there is a possibility of putting in a water system at the tiny Bethel Church. If that happens I want to be there. I want to help put it in. I want to sing Gracias Senor there.

Miscellaneous

2011-06-01T08:38:00.002-05:00

Miscellaneous thoughts on an already summer-like day:

I've fallen in love with my labyrinth. I've been trying to take a picture but it's too big to capture the whole thing. I've walked a lot of labs in my time but this one is different. I can walk it anytime I want. I can talk to God outloud, and do, venting various complaints and questions. The path is wide and I can walk boldly. The wall of trees surrounding it on three sides offer me privacy and the open field of horses on the fourth side gives me space and compadres. I will be updating it in the next few days with new illustrations and a smoother plan for painting it. I've also learned a lot about grass as a canvas.

There was simply a blockbuster evening of television on PBS last night. The first program was a history of surgery that I recorded. This turned out to be a good idea since I couldn't hear but about three words of it because Beaven spent the entire hour talking to a customer service rep about our poor cell phone coverage out here in the wilderness.

The next hour was on the black market for dead bodies. It turns out your body can be worth about a quarter of a million bucks when it's doled out in pieces for everything from ballistics testing to skin grafts. And crematoriums can sell them for a lot more than what they make setting them on fire. Plus, the odds of getting caught are small since the family gets a box of ashes later on and they have no idea whether the box of ashes is really Grandma or a few vagrant dogs or even the remnanats of some great S'Mores. Ashes are ashes. Dust is dust.

Fascinating stuff, no? By now Beaven had given up on the cell phone and control of the TV and started watching with me.

There was a short half-hour program on Jack Kilbey. He was the guy who invented the integrated circuit board, aka the micro chip. Everyone who has lived in Dallas as long as I did knows the interesting custom Texas Instruments had for years; I'm not sure if they still do it. They would shut down the whole place in the summertime and everyone took their vacation at the same time. Jack Kilbey was new and not eligible for vacation so he had the whole place to himself for two weeks. When everybody got back from vacation he had invented the chip that changed the world. Until that time they knew how to build bigger computers but couldn't move to the next level because they would have been too big to be practical. The microchip made things like going to the moon a possibility. The show was testimony to how much you can get done if you just have a little peace and quiet.

Then the final show I watched was talking trash. Trash in Egypt. I thought I had seen poor people in Guatemala and Mexico. And I never thought of Egypt as a poor country since they had built the pyramids. The poor in Egypt have a level of people called the Zaballeen. These are the poorest of the poor who would dig through the trash and sell the individual pieces for recycling, shredding plastic and aluminum to sell as raw materials. They didn't make much money to speak of but had gotten very good at using every speck of trash from the smallest glass shard to separating the rims of aluminum cans from the bodies. They had formed a school of sorts to teach their children to read and form contracts. It may be trash but they are good at it. One young boy went to Wales to study their methods and came home with a plan called "source separation" to ask people to separate out the food items from the non-food before the Zaballeen picked it up. I saw someone who is poor but also know his profession and is proud of his abilities.

I've been to the trash dumps in Mexico where the poor people live off the food they find there. And I've walked through La Lomita, the small village atop a mountain in Guatemala where the poor dump their trash down the mountainside, forming a river of plastic cascading down to the river. I have seen these things with my own eyes so I know them to be true. The Zaballeen of Eqypt seem to have figured out how to make a living for themselves by being good stewards of the earth.

Then came three foreign companies with a contract from the Egyptian government to pick up and dispose of trash. It put the Zaballeen out of business. And the heartbreak was that the foreign companies were taking the trash to the landfill and just dumping it. They showed one of the Zaballeen boys shocked by the waste: "How can they bury a fortune like this?"

I offer these tidbits to illustrate what great programing you can find on PBS and because I don't have any original thoughts of my own today. I spent the last two days writing about tea time with my girls and that may be my literary offering for you today.

I've got to get outside now before it gets any hotter. We have a pretty small planet and it's seems unhappy right now. Go read about tea.

Names

2011-05-24T09:14:00.012-05:00

Jennifer Erin Felix taught me that when you know someone’s name you cannot hate them. I met Jennifer at a youth event when she wrote one of the most awesome prayers I’ve ever heard. I followed her progress through college and we had several discussions over whether she wanted to go to seminary. But first, she had to sift through the wire mesh of limitations that would present itself to a gay woman in the Presbyterian Church. And she decided it was just too much trouble.

That was 10 years ago and the church is just now getting around to letting a congregation ordain anyone that fulfills the requirements. And a strictly hetero- sexual orientation has been taken out of the list of requirements in some (but not all—it depends on how they vote) Presbyteries in the PCUSA.

Barbara was my sister-in-law for eight years. There are only a select few who call her Babs, the nickname my brother bestowed on her early in the marriage. Loving Babs is as easy as rain falling down your cheeks in a springtime shower. She is a woman of grace, dignity and generosity. The thing I have always loved the most about her is that she always insisted on doing the dishes after Thanksgiving and Christmas. She wouldn’t even let me in the kitchen. She also was rabid about paying the tab at a restaurant. I learned to negotiate the payment in the parking lot before we even entered the restaurant.

When she left my brother for a woman I expected to have a jolt the first time I called her house and another woman answered. But to my surprise the only jolt was that the woman had a New York accent. It turned out that my Texan prejudice against Yankees was far stronger than my opinions about sexuality. Thankfully that affair didn’t last long and for around 30 years now Babs has been committed to Tracee, a delightful woman with no discernable accent.

Mary Stuart never had a middle name. She never married so she lived and died by those three syllables. She was my older sister and she died on her thirtieth birthday. In that short time she packed enough misery to take anyone to their knees. She had so many problems that being gay was just one on the list. She was an alcoholic and a drug addict; schizophrenic, short, overweight and left handed. And the left handedness was by default when the bullet from a suicide attempt left her right hand paralyzed.

She had more than a few problems, you might say.

When she came out to me in the last few years of her tumultuous life I couldn’t accept the idea. And I’m afraid I never did during her lifetime. At that time in the late 60’s, there had been no conversation in the American culture about homosexuality. So I was flying solo trying to figure out where a lesbian sister fit into my life. They found her body underneath her 3rd floor window the afternoon of her birthday. We will never know if she jumped or fell. By the time she died, her life was so chaotic that we seldom had any contact with each other, not enough to have any real conversations about her sexual orientation. But I can say with the authority of someone who watched her life unfold alongside my own that I know she never chose that any more than she chose to be schizophrenic or short, nearsighted, brown haired or right handed.

Isaac Bennett Towb actually began his life as Leah Kathryn. The thing I loved best about Leah was watching her carefully scoop chocolate cake onto a potato chip to eat when she was around second grade. “I like this kid,” I thought to myself. She was in my Confirmation Class but wasn’t a person to stand out, for being either good or bad in particular. I did notice that she was a good artist as evidenced by the pictures she would draw on her Styrofoam cup during meals. When she was in high school she started fading from church. She resurfaced about a year ago in search of names for when she transitioned into a legal male. He had one of the most interesting and imaginative experiences a human can have: He got to pick the name that went on his new birth certificate. He got to name himself. And he wanted to be called Ike.

His mother and I, being the age we are, could only think of President Eisenhower at the sound of the name. I suggested putting the more formal name of Isaac on the documents; “ In case you ever want to run for president,” I told him. I know it worked for Eisenhower to be known as Ike but I had some doubts that my Ike would command an army on the same magnitude as D Day. Eisenhower could probably have run as Shirley and still been elected President. Plus, I pointed out, Isaac means “God’s laughter.” Somewhere along the line, biology had played an enormous, cruel joke on Leah and this would give Ike (and God) the last laugh.

You may have figured out by now that I do not personally believe in the inerrancy of the bible and I don’t run around proof-texting my religion. And I don’t believe that my own marriage needs defending. We are just fine, thank you. Why don’t you go feed some starving children instead of worrying about who is married to whom?

I believe in love. I believe, like Jennifer, that when you know someone’s name you cannot hate them. And when you find something unique in them like eating chocolate cake with potato chips you can fall in love with them so purely, so joyfully, so exuberantly, that sex becomes only a tiny part of who they are.

Can we please move on to more important things now?

One final note: I always get permission from the people involved when I write something like this. Babs, who has more guts than anyone I know, also has a small but growing business and was a little lerry of having her last name used so I left it off. Maybe we haven't progressed as far as I thought.

Love

2011-05-18T09:02:00.007-05:00

I want to talk about love today. I saw love in more different forms last week than I think I have ever seen.

We went to a 50th wedding anniversary party on Saturday.
We lived across the street from Shirley and Wes for over half of those 50 years. Their daughter and our daughter were best friends from elementary school until high school. So Saturday we sat with other neighbors and caught up on neighborhood news. When you share a street, utility companies and weather with a group of people it’s a bonding of its own sort even if you don’t do anything else together. We all paid fairly close to the same amount for our houses so it puts us in pretty close to the same economic bracket. Harvard Drive is a stable, blue-collar neighborhood. Most of the folks on our little cul-de-sac are the original owners. Everyone kept the same jobs and spouses for all these years. We were smart enough to not discuss politics with each other beyond the city’s zoning plans.

I would have enjoyed the party even without the Elvis impersonator. I love my neighbors. And I love the way Shirley and Wes have loved each other for 50 years.

Last weekend our current neighbors out here in the country sold their house. They lived here a little over 10 years but we barely knew them for most of that time. It’s easy to do that in the country. There’s a lot of physical distance that makes it easy to not know anything that’s going on. For all we knew, they could have been cooking meth over at their house all these years.

Until the husband died. That morning his wife called me for help and Beaven and I became part of their lives in a very intimate way that none of us would have planned. This spring they’ve needed help with their mower and Beaven has been called on to go over there a few times. And by now the house holds my friend, her daughter, granddaughter and great grandson. Then we discovered we have a mutual delight in God’s wonders. And I have fallen in love with them. They brought the great-grandson over one night last week and we spent an hour watching the turtles and fish in my pond.

Love your neighbor as yourself. And I have found that I usually do. Beaven and I have been very lucky in that department.

Then, we went to the senior voice recital of one of the children of our church. I’ve known Raelee all her life. It’s easy to love a newborn baby. (Not so easy when they’re in middle school years, I do have to admit. Middle school presents problems all its own for everyone.) But coming into the home stretch of high school and going off to college you come back full circle and wonder where the time went. I looked around in the audience at the recital and figured half of them were people in our church family. I love my church family. We are mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters to each other. We attend more weddings, baptisms and funerals within our church family than in our own biological ones. We even go on vacations together if you count mission trips.

But it was the passage of amendment 10-A that caused the most dramatic reflection on love. Because in the middle of the happiness over its passage there was also deep sadness. And when one of your family is in pain it hurts you, too.

Let me catch you up: “Amendment 10A” is an amendment to the rules of the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) that makes it possible to ordain gay and lesbian people as ministers, elders and deacons. This is a major move for the Presbyterians even while some denominations have been ordaining gay people for years. (Actually, so have the Presbyterians. We just didn’t talk about it because we weren’t supposed to be doing it. It has been very much a "Don't ask, don't tell" atmosphere.) Many, many, many, yes—many, of my friends have hoped for this move for years.

But there were no High Fives over the passage of this amendment, much like we didn’t need to get so excited over bin Laden’s death. Because in every victory there is always a defeat. The people who celebrate the passage of this amendment know our brothers and sisters who opposed it are hurting. And I know this because I saw it in the face of a dear friend.

Who would have thought there would be so much tension over who a person loves?

I knew John was opposed to this move. When I talked to him after church on Sunday I could tell in his face and the strain in his voice that he was deeply hurt. He told me so. He felt abandoned by his church. There are few hurts comparable to feeling abandoned by the one group you should be able to trust. This was not a time to argue my point, nothing I could say to make him rejoice. We had gone beyond logic. I was standing there in the Ed Center with someone in deep, gut wrenching, soul searing pain. And that someone was a man I love as a Christian brother as much as anyone else in our church.

I’ve known John probably 20 years. We’ve planned and served on committees, church suppers, youth work and bible study together. I know his kids well and am proud of the people they have become.

No matter how you cut it, you don’t have to agree with someone in order to love them. And, as liberal as I am, as happy as I am for this change in the church, I still come back to the sadness it has brought some of my dearest friends.

We step into the future together and pray for healing. I could pray that someday John will think the way I do but that’s kind of a stupid idea. I can’t ask that someone else change the way they think any more than I would want them to try to change the way I think.

There is one key thing I love about John. He is one of only a handful of people who can disagree with me with respect and genuine curiosity. He will ask me why I think the way I do and he will listen to my answer. I will do the same. We seldom change each other’s mind but we listen to each other with respect.

Lately I’ve been very sensitive to folks posting offensive remarks on facebook. It’s usually about politics. The remoteness and sometimes anonymity of facebook allows us to say things to each other that we would never say in person. And it is all too easy to un-friend someone on the internet.

I lost a good friend once in an angry conversation via email. In retrospect, I wish I had gone to her house and talked to her in person. I lost someone I loved and wonder what I could have done to prevent it.

I have more to say about this but I am close to my limit of 1,000 words and your attention span. I will think on this subject some more and revisit it later.

Think of the people you love and rejoice in God’s gift of love. We will come back to the subject another day. It’s important.

Wedding Tips

2011-05-11T08:06:00.003-05:00

I spent the last couple of days perfecting one of my newest passions: building labyrinths. I wrote about it in my newest blog with a lofty name:
Really Cool Stuff

Just in case you don't find those words a good Wednesday activity, here's another bunch of words about weddings. Getting this close to June always makes one think of weddings. My friend Debbie's son is getting married this weekend. I have a hunch a wedding is easier for the groom's mother than the bride's.

Neither one of our girls got married in June. Instead, they got married within a five month time span. This made it a lot easier to plan Emily’s wedding since Elizabeth’s had been so recent. All we had to do was call the florist, photographer, caterer and basically ask for what we had done a mere five months prior. In some cases we learned valuable lessons the first time around and made a few changes. But in some case we didn’t learn a damned thing and made the same stupid mistake all over again. I offer wisdom we learned the hard way.

• Brides: Let your mother run the show. She’s waited all your life for this occasion, since the moment of your birth. She started planning this wedding the day she brought you home from the hospital. Your name was probably chosen based on how it would look on the invitation

• Mothers: Let your daughter run the show. She’s read about a billion brides magazines and knows what she wants--she wants the wedding just like the one the millionaire on Long Island had last spring with the string quartet and the orchid canopy. But, she’s also probably helping to pay for it and it’s her money.

• Men: Let the women run the show. Your job is to show up in the rented tux and keep your mouth shut. If you possibly can, try to look interested. If not, avoid giving any kind of negative opinion. You have no idea what you’re talking about and nobody really cares what you think. How many weddings have you planned?

• Relax. Somebody, sometime, will screw up. Expect it. Accept it. Apologize, Move on.

• Allot a certain number of nervous breakdowns. Keep track of them. Pace yourself so you don’t use them all up before the big day.

• Try not to let nervous breakdowns upset you. If the bride wants to throw something across the room because she’s late to go taste potential cakes, just smile and point out that she appears a little upset. You might tell her gently “This looks like you may be having one of your 10 allotted breakdowns, dear.” But don’t say anything else. Nothing.

• Invite everybody you can think of. It’s better to be accused of trolling for gifts than accused of being a snob.

• Be kind to your feet. Wear tennis shoes or flip flops as much as you can, even up to 15 minutes before the ceremony is permissible. (Try not to appear in public like this, however).

• Avoid heavy medications and/or alcohol. You want to be able to remember all this and you certainly don’t want to embarrass anybody.

• Forget about eating at the reception. It won’t happen. Yes, you did pay a lot of money for this food. Plan instead to eat twice as much at the next wedding you attend.

• Put those disposable cameras at the reception tables. It’s the best money spent with the greatest payback. One warning, however: keep them out of the hands of the 9 year old cousin from out of town, otherwise you could spend your money on 86 fuzzy pictures of various food trays, the ice sculpture and the serving guys.

• Have the ceremony recorded some way, either audio or video. Later, when your spouse claims you promised to deliver fresh squeezed orange juice every morning, you will have a record of what you really did say in your vows.

• Have a roll of tape handy at the reception. Make sure each gift has a card firmly attached to it before the cousins start throwing them into the back of the van. Duct tape is not too extreme for this job. It saves you from trying to match up loose cards to gifts a week later after the honeymoon and thanking someone for the wrong gift. After the reception is over, nobody cares what the packages look like anymore. Use the duct tape.

• Look at it this way: The wedding ceremony is really a celebration of two people that have, hopefully, grown into adults. They will be surrounded by the folks who helped raise them and other people who have an interest in their lives; people who are very proud of them. The reception is your way to thank this extended family for being part of all this.

• After it’s all over, sit back the next evening and prop your feet up. Take stock of all that you’ve done: scouts, braces, football games, college and, now, a wedding. You’re through. Go ahead and cry.

Painting for Habitat

2011-05-03T22:27:00.007-05:00

I figure everybody has talked enough about You Know Who and What Happened to him. I've got a busy day on Wednesday so let me post early, be brief and change the pace a bit. I am not going to say a word about You Know Who or What Happened.

Always on the look-out for something new to report, I found out Beaven and I had a chance to take part in a Habitat for Humanity build. We've always wanted to do that so we took it as a great adventure. The Habitat people in Mt Pleasant were having a "Women Build" and Peggy Rounseville is the interim pastor at the Presbyterian church in Mt Pleasant. She's also part of a very unique bible study we have in Winnsboro, her former church. I've talked about it many times before. It's a bible study that combines the mainstream denominational woman of the town and the local drug and alcohol rehab center across from the church. So Peggy figured the Habitat build was the perfect project for the ladies from the Rehab.

You can imagine Beaven's surprise to be invited to take part in a Women Build. In order to qualify as a "Women Build" you have to have at least 75% of your team be women and we were well within that range so it didn't hurt to have him. Peggy brought her husband, too.

It didn't really matter. We didn't need the men at all but they didn't get in our way. Our job was pretty tame: painting. Women have been painting their own houses for centuries. In fact, I would bet money that most home interiors are painted by women over the years.

I tape and bedded our unfinished garage almost as soon as we moved into it in 1977. Then I painted it baby blue. When Beaven got upset because he thought baby blue was a "wimpy" color I told him the next time I painted the garage by myself I would paint it pink.

Women do a lot more home projects than you might think. And, to be quite frank, men only get in our way sometimes. I used to wait until Beaven went out of town then would invite Linda Peavy to come help me with my latest project. We called ourselves "Mertz and Ricardo" and our wallpaper was famous for it's permanence. Beaven would return home, set his suitcase down in the entryway and smell for fresh paint. If he didn't smell paint he knew he could expect wall paper or new furniture.

We were excited at the idea of taking the ladies from the rehab to work on a Habitat house. About the only thing different about sending people from a rehab to help with this was the tiny stipulation that you had to pass a background check per one of Habitat's rules. Except these ladies were in a drug and alcohol rehab and ...uh, well...we found out about half of them have felony convictions.

So here are Beaven and I driving two of the Ladies Without Felonies to Mt Pleasant. And we got a short education on the difference between a felony and a misdemeanor. The short answer was that it depended on how badly you hurt someone and what kind of weapon you used. The woman who had beat up her husband with his own crutches got off on a misdemeanor since crutches aren't that bad of a weapon. Not like a gun, for instance. That would be a felony, for sure.

These are the ladies who taught me a few years ago to "never get arrested in the middle giving yourself a permanent."

There's always something new to learn if you pay attention.

Anyway, I also found out you can paint an entire 1,100 sq ft house inside in less than two hours if you have enough people. We were almost in each other's way, bumping rollers into ladders and stuff. The Habitat folks are well prepared, well-equipped and quietly but firmly Christian. We had a lot of fun and felt good about our work. It was a pretty quiet job.

We also found out the perfect way to have a group photo. After all these years I got to be in the group photo of my dreams and probably every woman's dreams. The banner we stood behind covered everything but our faces.

Oh, and the reason to never give yourself a home permanent when you're about to get arrested? Because the cops won't wait for you to rinse the solution. They will take you straight to jail without waiting for anything. This was told to me by a woman with a 2 inch bald spot at the edge of her forehead. A woman who has been drug-free for the three years now since she first gave me this bit of wisdom. A woman I now call my friend.

Documents

2011-04-27T07:59:00.006-05:00

I am growing weary of this whole “birther” thing. I’m not sure some people would accept it if we had a home movie showing a baby emerging from a woman’s vagina and wearing a nametag saying “Hello My name is Barack Obama” with the Hawaiian surf rolling in the background and a dozen girls doing the hula off to one side and Don Ho waving an American flag.

It turns out that documents are important things. So in the interest of any future presidential plans I thought I’d publish my own birth certificate in this space for all to see. Despite being fairly non-political and happily retired I like to keep my options open. Who can say I won’t be tempted to run for president someday?

To my horror, I couldn’t find my birth certificate. I found the birth and death certificates of my parents and sister. The birth certificates of my kids and grandkids. Social security cards, marriage licenses and military discharge papers. I even found the notarized document Elizabeth signed 20 years ago vowing to run any errand I ever asked for the rest of her life without complaint in exchange for me going to the store to buy her Dr Pepper for a band Christmas party.

I am very good about protecting important documents. But the piece of paper certifying that I was born is AWOL.

I pinch myself. It hurts. I am alive, this much is certain. I remember the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missle crisis, the Kennedy assassination and the Beatles so I’m around the age of 60 or so. But I couldn’t actually prove this if you asked me.

I have a driver’s license, a library card and a gift card to Barnes and Noble with $2.63 left on it from Christmas. I have a passport. So somewhere, sometime, I did have a birth certificate. You can’t get a passport without one.

I have a marriage license saying that Beaven and I got married. But that only gives us the right to bicker a lot and proves that our children are legitimate.

I have a will, the deed to our house and all the car titles. When I go, everything will be in place for an orderly transit out of this life and onto the next. But can you die without a birth certificate proving you were ever born? Am I sentenced to live forever, wandering this mortal coil well past my prime, a frail, ghostly body unable to pass on to the next level of existence because I can’t even prove I ever existed to start with?

This was starting to look like a serious problem.

I looked again in a different file marked “important documents.” All I turned up this time was the copyright certification for my book and more certificates of births, marriages and deaths. It was starting to look like Spoon River Anthology around here. The only thing to do in a case like this was to go shopping. That always has a way of clearing one’s mind.

When I got home and checked the mail there were final (let’s hope) bills from the doctor and hospital for my cancer treatment. While it wasn’t exactly a birth certificate I took it as more support for the reality that I was indeed born and am still alive.

FYI-if you are going to get one of the high dollar diseases be sure you start and finish treatment in the same calendar year. I tried to do this but because of the holidays, snow days and machine malfunctions I ended up with about three week’s worth of radiation in January, which meant the clock re-started on my benefit deductible. The lady at the doctor's office tried to cheer me up by saying I would soon reach “the annual maximum” and that would be the most I would pay in 2011. This was a very small consolation. tiny. miniscule.

I ate some of the humus left over from Easter on a piece of pita bread. Then the rest of the ice cream. Then the left over popcorn from the movie last night. This is how some people excuse gluttony: we call it “stress eating.” I came up with a motto of sorts: “I digest; therefore I am.” Having once again proven to myself that I do exist I still don't have a piece of paper saying it. I give up. I’ll just have to apply for a copy of my birth certificate. Then I can die in peace or maybe make hotel reservations in New Hampshire for the primary. It will open up so many options for me.

William and Kate might pay attention to all this hoop-la over certificates. It won’t matter a hill of beans that more people in the history of the entire universe will watch their wedding either by waking up at an ungodly hour of the night or recording it. Nor will it matter that every syllable of the vows they make will be recorded. Or that the Archbishop of Freaking Canterbury and/or the Dean of Westminster Abbey will be the officiating authorities. Not even a post-nuptial kiss on the balcony of the royal palace will make it official. Or having the Queen of England toast you. Boy, oh, boy, they’d better get that piece of paper.

PS: As I write this, the TV has preempted Oprah for the second day in a row for weather news. There’s some poor schmuck of a beginning weatherman driving around in the rain trying to locate a tornado he had spotted and then lost track of. The senior weatherman in the studio was politely telling him to go find that tornado and don’t come home until you do. This is going to be a tough spring.

Fannie's Goes to Japan

2011-04-19T19:05:00.007-05:00

My Aunt Marcia had a pretty serious stroke last week and is in the hospital. They have practically put guards at her door since the prescription for her recovery is to remain still and without any kind of visits or stimulus. She’s a popular lady and her friends needed a way to communicate with her. So they set up a Caring Bridge page for get well messages. It seems to be working. My cousin reads the notes to her every day and she enjoys them.

Aunt Marcia is the only one on the Stuart side of my family who knows who Fannie Flamingo is. Marcia has a flamingo friend herself so we’ve enjoyed keeping up with the others’ adventures. It was only natural for Fannie to drop everything and fly to visit her in the hospital. Here's what I wrote to her on the Caring Bridge website:

Dear Aunt Marcia,

Help is on its way! When Fannie heard you were in the hospital she dropped everything and headed out to find you.

This is a pretty major move on Fannie's part since she had already committed to a project to seal the nuclear reactors in Japan. Her plan is to lead 500,000 flamingos over the reactors and let nature take its course as they fly over. Various authorities are convinced this would seal the reactors forever.

Her old friend, Rudy Guliani recommended her personally for this job after the great work she did with the Displaced Pigeon Project in New York after 9/11. Fannie has a way of finding practical solutions to major disasters.

For now she is trying to find someone to take her place in leading the Japan project because we all know how important it is to get the reactors sealed.

She was in a fast-track Japanese language class when she heard you were in the hospital. She left immediately and took to the air on her way to find you. She didn't even stop to pack. So, if you see a disheveled bright pink flamingo wearing a kimona and geisha make-up don't worry, it will be Fannie there in your room to cheer you on.
ps- I wouldn't tell the nurses if you see her. You know how nurses can be sometimes

So, for Cousin Mickey (a charter member of our Mischief Makers Club), here is the background on Fannie Flamingo:

Fannie appeared at my doorstep as part of a flock of six plastic lawn ornaments in the fall of 1999. They were part of a church youth fund raiser. But they came to life in my mind and I soon recognized them for their individual personalities. I started writing about them.

Fannie is the leader of the bunch and the one who first knocked on the front door that cold and wet November morning. She had rain dripping off her beak as she asked to come in and warm herself. Fannie brought Fern in with her since Fern was crying in the rain. Francine was next; she made some hot cocoa and proceeded to redecorate my house. Farfel went to the backyard and started building a nest for himself in the garden. Fred wasn’t nearly as polite; he just walked on in, sat on our couch and turned the TV on. Frank started building bunk beds when it looked like they would be here for awhile. Farfel helped him.

Each bird had its own distinct personality. Francine eventually got on Fred’s nerves when her vacuuming made so much noise he couldn’t hear the TV. He finally stuffed one of her legs down her throat and Frank had to stop painting the garage and take her to the hospital.

I began to talk about the birds so much that my daughters developed a kind of sibling rivalry with them.

I took Fannie with me on my first trip to Guatemala. When one of my friends heard about this plan she worried that I really did intend to pack a huge pink plastic lawn ornament. Being a veteran of many trips to Guatemala she insisted I couldn’t take Fannie through customs so she gave me a Beanie Baby flamingo. Two days before we were to leave for home the beanie baby Fannie disappeared. So my stories about her adventures got only better.

I feared she had been kidnapped by a remnant of the guerilla forces from their recently settled civil war. I later found out she had flown the coop with a dangerously attractive Toucan named Jose. Things went from bad to worse in a country where lawlessness is the norm and drugs are plentiful. The Toucan split and left her to her own devices.

My friend Mamie Broadhurst spotted her in North Carolina and sent me a picture. Mamie said she was hesitant to stop and talk because Fannie looked a bit confused.

Somehow, Fannie ended up at the Betty Ford clinic with a tattoo under her left wing that read “Free Elian.” She had no memory of how she got the tat or found the Betty. But she emerged from the clinic a new bird. A more dynamic and energetic bird, if that was possible.

She was invited to walk in the 2001 Inaugural parade and met Big Bird. They had a brief romance and she moved to New York City for a while. She realized she has horrible taste in men when she eventually noticed all Big Bird wanted to do was count to ten and sing. “Males can be so immature and shallow,” she told me.

She was still in NYC on September 11th. When the towers fell Fannie’s bright pink feathers were about the only sight people could pick out in the great cloud of gray dust. So she led folks to the Brooklyn Bridge and safety. Then she started a big pot of coffee brewing and set up shop at the St Paul’s Chapel by the pile of rubble.

That night she realized the fall of the Twin Towers had left so many pigeons without a place to roost at night. She didn’t sleep a wink that night and began her ministry, the Displaced Pigeon Project, the next morning. For the next year she spent a lot of time flying to various cities like Chicago to find similar skyscrapers for the pigeons.

She also found a steady and dependable male to spend time with. Sam is a bald eagle who lives atop the Washington Monument. He is such an instrumental figure in the federal government that they put his picture on the stamps.

They fell into an easy and comfortable romance. Sam’s work on the Anthrax Evaluation team kept him busy for most of 2002 and when he was home, Fannie was usually off on a project of her own.

She was eventually recognized by Mayor Guiliani and sent on other missions. In fact, I was there last year on September 11th when the city gave her a nice plaque. However, she was so put off by the demonstrations against the Islamic Center that she took to wearing a burqa for a while.

She led a protest in Trafalgar Square against a new law which the banned feeding the pigeons. Some of the NYC pigeons had been placed there post-9/11 and she couldn't beileve such a welcoming city would do that to their own pigeons. She chained herself to the statue of Lord Nelson and passed out sacks of bird seed. But the mayor of London called Guilani and he convinced her to choose her battles more carefully and she left London.

For the last few years, she has lived in Teculutan, Guatemala working with the Quetzal birds there. These birds are beautiful and have a long tail very similar to the peacock. The Quetzal is a shy bird and lives hidden in the forest. It has no song, nor makes noise of any kind. I guess when you’re so beautiful that you stand out in a crowd your only defense from predators is to keep your mouth shut. The bird is so revered that the Guatemalan currency is called the Quetzal. There is an old Mayan story that the Quetzal once had a beautiful song but when the Spanish conquered Guatemala the Quetzal stopped singing. The legend goes that the Quetzal will sing again when peace and justice return to Guatemala.

When Fannie heard this she resolved to teach the Quetzal to sing again. She shares an apartment in the backyard of Karla Cordon’s house in Teculutan with a parrot named Polly Parton. Periodically they will fly off into the forests to work with the Quetzals. I see her sometimes when I visit Guatemala.

And she usually visits me in October when she comes into town to visit her sister Fernie who operates a Funnel Cake stand at the Texas State Fair. I tried letting Fernie stay with me one year during the Fair but you wouldn’t believe the mess she made in my kitchen. The only thing she knows how to cook is fried foods, preferably the kind you dust with powdered sugar. How that bird does love to throw powdered sugar all over the kitchen!

Fannie isn’t entirely comfortable seeing her sister so that always lends a certain tension. Fernie stole Fannie's boyfriend and ended up marrying him. But early in the marriage Floyd was killed in a tragic woodworking accident with a floor-mounted Delta Planer/Joiner. All that Fernie has left of him is a pillow made of his feathers. She sleeps with that pillow every night.

Fannie comes out of retirement at various times whenever there is an emergency. I never know when she will pop in on me or my imagination. Let’s hope she can get Marcia back to health soon. I know the Nuclear Reactor Defecation Project is important to the world’s health.

Ubuntu

2011-04-13T11:15:00.014-05:00

I spent the day yesterday at simply the most fascinating collection of Hope Per Square Foot that I have ever witnessed. It was an event at SMU called Earth and Humanity Week.

It's arranged very much like the State Fair where you walk around and visit one project or another, usually a structure designed for immediate, sustainable and/or temporary housing in the face of poverty or natural disasters. If that is a boring concept to you check out now because that’s all I’m going to talk about today. But I have pictures, though, so that might help some.

I can’t take too much credit for the adventure because I never would have heard about it except my friend Miatta Wilson sent me a heads-up. Miatta has never failed me; whether it’s a book recommendation or a plan to put on a Vacation Bible School in Guatemala (without being able to speak Spanish), her ideas are always golden. So, when she suggested that this might interest me I immediately planned to drive into Dallas for it.

Beaven already drives into Dallas every Tuesday to visit his old buddies from work. I have no idea what they do over lunch but it takes him the entire day to do it. When I combined this arrangement with the fact that parking at SMU is a nightmare on a good day, Tuesday seemed like a great day to do it. He dropped me off at the campus on his way to lunch then picked me up when he was finished.

Our timing was perfectly in sync. I had lunch with our daughter who works nearby. We even had a “W” sighting, We knew former president Bush was scheduled to give a speech at an unrelated event on the SMU campus that day. He has an office in Elizabeth’s building so she’s seen the Secret Service entourage enough times by now that it was obvious to her what was going on when she saw the assembly of black SUVs. In fact, she claims it’s so obvious to her who they are that she says they really should switch to something like white Toyotas if they really wanted to travel ingognito. But I guess they don’t want that. Maybe that’s one of the perks of being the president or Oprah. Everybody knows when you’re coming.

Anyway. So, here is my report on what I found: I highly recommend that you go see it for yourself. Seriously. The village will be up through Friday. There is a parking garage within two blocks of the village. Look it up at www.smu.edu/News/2011/engineering-and-humanity

They had tents, yurts and even the corrugated plastic tents I lived in doing rebuilding after Hurrican Katrina. They’re designed to be easily sent post-disaster for immediate housing. There was even one igloo made of coils of sandbags. They had plenty of water purification and solar power systems to show you. There was a booth for Toms shoes and even jewelry made from trash.

The igloo made of coiled sandbags was the most unusual looking.

Then they had solutions to water and energy problems. I saw about three solar paneled exhibits and a couple of water purification systems. They even had one on raising bunnies. I wasn't totally sure if they used the bunnies for fertilizer or for dinner so I hurried past that one. And there were a couple of tables offering jewelry and handbags made by women in poor countries--the catchiest was the display of purses and belts made from trashed pull tabs from canned drinks. Beauty made from trash. I think it may have been the greatest concentration of imagination in action ever on this campus.

After seeing so many of these exhibits I had the same thought that sneaked up on me a few years ago during a trip to Guatemala. We were held over in El Salvador when our original flight had a few snafus. We spent a lot of time waiting at the airport that year and met a lot of mission teams like ours. Then we were put up for the night in a hotel where we met even more missionaries. Some of these folks were going to paint churches, some to build houses and some were headed to drill water wells in such a remote site that they would have to walk up the mountain carrying everything on their backs.

Water, wells for the water, water filtration systems, cinder block houses, painting churches—airplanes in the summer are full of people going to Central America to build houses and improve the water. And I couldn’t help but ask “Haven’t we purified all the water by now? Haven’t we built every widow a house by now?”

When I went back and counted what we’ve done on our trips since the first one in 1999 I count that we painted at least four or five churches, one widow’s house built, two water treatment systems installed, and five year’s worth (well over 100 children in total) of children lifted out of a state of malnutrition. We haven’t done all the work ourselves. Some of them like the Childrens Nutrition Project we’ve paid for. But I’ve witnessed great changes in the last ten years. And that's just one small group of people.

Oh, and I forgot the houses in Mexico that our friends Damon and Annette Renaud have built. At last count I think it numbered in the hundreds.

And I didn’t include all the trips our church made to help with the rebuilding after Hurrican Katrina.

Given the plane loads of missionary tourists every summer haven’t we built everyone a house by now? After visiting SMU yesterday, the answer is clearly “no.” And we never will. Politics and weather insure that there will always be people in need of better water, nutrition and housing. We will never finish.

My favorite exhibit by far was the house they built from trashed plastic containers.

I'm not sure the pristine campus of SMU will ever be the same after this. But I don't imagine they will leave the house on the campus.

It's called the Ubuntu Blox House. Ubuntu is an African word variously translated as "I am what I am because of who we all are." It's the latest crunchy word and also the name of Beaven's favorite software. The genius of the house is that it is made out of plastic trash. Harvey Lacey invented a rig that compresses the plastic into squares similar to hay bales.

Then you wire the bales together, wrap it all with chicken wire and cover that inside and out with either concrete or locally available adobe. It solves two problems: what to do with plastic trash and how to find affordable housing. This is literally a house made from trash. His grandsons built one of these houses right there on the SMU campus.

The apparatus Harvey invented is free source, meaning he hasn’t patented it and anyone who wants can find the plans to build it. He designed it this way, so that anyone with welding skills in any country can go to the internet and start building. All the materials to build one of these houses can be found locally and the estimated cost to build it is $250. Their website is www.recycledplasticblockhouses.com You can also go to www.harveylacey.com to see pictures and explanations.

And this is where I met my two newest best friends: Zac and Travis Hibdon, Harvey's grandsons.

I spent a long time talking to Travis and Zac. They were full of enthusiasm and new ideas. I love to talk to kids like this. When I went into my inspirational lecture #34 (“you have nothing to tie you down, you can go anywhere and do anything”) they were already way ahead of me. So I sat down on a cot and continued to listen to them. Even in the heat of the day the house was still cool because of the thick walls. The idea that eventually came to me was very new to me yet I could tell by their faces it was already familiar to Travis and Zac. Even though I've lived three times longer than they have, they had already thought of it.

Maybe... Hang in here with me. Maybe we won’t be finished “fixing” the world when all the poor people have a house like this built of trash and adobe. Maybe we will be finished fixing the world when the rich people, myself included, have a humble house like this.

In our zeal to equalize the world’s wealth we think we must lift the poor up to our level. Maybe all we need to do is reach down and live at their level. Maybe the trick isn’t to provide everyone in the world with a 3,000 square foot house. Maybe the trick is for me to be happy living in an adobe house made from trash that cost $250. Maybe then we can afford the time and money to purify all the water, feed all the children and protect them from disease. Or maybe we could meet in the middle.

I’ve written enough to get myself in trouble for talking like a communist. Gotta go. Think about it. It’s been done before. Read Acts 4:32. I am what I am because of who we all are.

When I Get Older I Will Be Stronger

2011-04-05T15:39:00.008-05:00

What in the world was I thinking?

I call it the “Eight O’Clock Question.” It’s a question I ask myself without fail around 8 o'clock Friday night every time I take youth on a trip. The question dates all the way back to the first time I took 16 third grade Girl Scouts on a camping trip in the rain. That was about thirty years ago. Do the math. Yes, I am old.

Somewhere I switched from Girl Scouts to the church youth. Same kind of kids, same energy level; same S’mores, stomach aches in the middle of the night and stupdendous smiles framing gleaming orthodontia. Same Eight O’Clock Question. Even thirty years ago my body was rebellious by evening on Friday.

Why do I do these things? I could have easily declined. No... I brought this whole thing on myself so I never could pass off the blame.

Friday evening is usually when I remember with some surprise than I am not as young as the other people in the room. I will invariable prefer to go to sleep at that moment or, at least, find a way to make these young creatures be still and silent. Even for five minutes. Dear God, couldn’t we have just five minutes of peace? Maybe three? One?

But I keep forgetting these things and the Spirit moves me to do it over and over. The minute they ask for sponsors my hand is the first one up. Why?

Because I love it. Because I know something now that I'm older that I didn't know 30 years ago. Because I know the Eight A.M. Answer to the Eight O'Clock Question.

Because there is a huge Pay Day: the glorious moment when the answers come. Pay Day is Sunday morning when we start wrapping things up and I realize that I have survived. My muscles will scream at me on Monday morning but by 8 am on Sunday I get a second wind and I sprint to the finish. That's when all the energy released over the weekend settles in my soul and I connect with the Holy Spirit of God who brought me here, who sustained me, who whispers in my ear that there is a beautiful plan for us all and that I am part of that plan.

Staying forever young
Singing songs underneath the sun
Let’s rejoice in the beautiful game
Then together at the end of the day

We all say:
When I get older I will be stronger
They’ll call me freedom Just like a waving flag

I didn’t set out to try to stay young. My body certainly hasn’t stayed that way but my mind has. And that may be the cruel joke here. For the present I am able to limp through. I know that someday I will have to hang it up but for now I’m not ready and I thank God for that.

So far, the only adjustment I've had to make for my age is not playing Giants, Wizards and Elves. I almost cracked a rib playing this game back in the fall when I got knocked down and sort of trampled over by a herd of kids.

I tried to record everything. I'll share just a couple of the best parts. And one of them was so totally random it had to be serendipity:

I didn't get any video of my favorite energizer since I wasn't behind the camera. I was down on the floor dancing with the kids. So here's a video I found on Youtube of what we were doing:

Thank you, God.

With love,
from the kids at

First Presbyterian Church of Garland, Mabank, and McKinney

Throwing Out the Welcome Mat

2011-03-29T21:35:00.002-06:00

I love to have people visit us. We are not, however, for the casual visitor. We live so far in the boondocks that people don't just drop by. It takes some planning. Then we have what I call our "dog bell" which is to say that the dogs announce any vehicle entering our property with excited barking. It is rare to have anyone get to our front door without us knowing about it.

Still, we try to offer a welcoming front door. I have a sign to welcome folks:

I don't think you need to be able to read Spanish to know we're happy to have you here.

So....having said all of this to explain how much we love people appear at our front door I have to show you what it looks like today:

I guess all it's missing is a skull and crossbones. Or maybe a Quarantine sign. Possibly a smallpox outbreak?

Let me explain.

For the past five years now we've had a bird make a nest on the overhang of our front porch. The first couple of years we really didn't pay much attention. We would walk to the front porch and a bird would fly around us, flapping her wings and acting all upset. But we never connected the dots. Then a couple of years ago we finally looked up and noticed the nest. And realized that's why the cat had been hanging around the front porch so much.

I started photographing the nest and kept track of the new generation's progress from eggs to first flight. The opportunity to watch a baby bird's maiden flight from the nest is just one of those indescribable feelings, when your throat feels funny--kind of a cross between a sob and a huzzah. I've been privileged to watch this scene two times now and consider myself incredibly lucky. Afterwards, I left the nest for a short while then took it down to make room for another one the following year.

She showed up right on time last week and started building the nest. We started using the back door to give her some peace and quiet. And also to avoid the whole "bird flapping her wings in a panic scaring me to death" thing. But once in a while we forget to go to the back door so the big "X" is to remind us.

I am starting to worry a bit about this year's bird. I know it's an Eastern Phoebe. I'm just not sure if it's the same bird as last year. Last year's nest was an extremely tidy, classical teacup shape.

I just don't know about this year's nest. It kind of looks like the mother bird is on drugs or something.

We'll see. I'll keep you posted.

For the story of last year's bird adventures check in the archives for May 4th of 2010.

Praying the Hot Flashes

2011-03-22T17:14:00.011-06:00

After all the workshops and retreats in the last two months I have been on a quest to pray the Hours. Praying the Hours, sometimes called “the Office”, is a spiritual practice used mostly by Roman Catholics. And the word “practice” means just that: doing something over and over so you can do it better each time. Over and over so it comes naturally to you, like piano practice. Over and over so you remember to do it or so that you do it without even thinking about it. Over and over so that it becomes an integral part of your life.

As my physical body ages and weakens I want to strengthen my spiritual life. I’ve known older women who were bedfast but whose prayers I coveted more than material riches. I hope to move into that important role when it’s my turn.

Catholics who pray the Hours pause seven times a day to pray. Sister Macrina Wiederkehr calls them Seven Sacred Pauses and wrote a book called just that. The seven times are midnight, dawn, mid-morning, noon, mid-afternoon, evening and night. As Sister Macrina calls them, “those times of the day that the earth’s turning offers us.”

But terms like “evening” and “night” seemed sort of willy-nilly and haphazard to me. For goodness sakes if you’re going to do this by times then set some times. Who knows evening from night? The accountant in me screamed for specifics, So for MY prayer time I assigned seven regular times: 6am, 9am, noon, 3pm, 6pm, 9pm and midnight. This is the way an accountant sees things. Decently and in order. Can you tell I’m Presbyterian?

I was prepared to ditch either the 6am prayer or the midnight one. I know God wants me to get more than six hours of sleep at night.

I set about to have my cell phone alarm go off at those exact times. But I never mastered the alarm feature on my phone and only succeeded in having my alarm go off in the middle of church and announcing to the rest of the world what a klutz I am.

Somewhere I heard that Muslims pray five times- morning, noon, afternoon, sunset, evening. And like all good overachievers and accountants, they sometimes get all caught up in the exact times for sunrise and sunset. And that’s how I ended up with a phone app for the Muslim prayer times. It not only makes a little beep on your phone when it's time to pray, it adjusts the times for the changing sunrise and set. I figured this out when the alarm times changed by a minute every day or two. This was starting to look like my sort of plan. The app can also point you to Mecca using the GPS feature in the phone. Not only will you know when to pray but you’ll know what direction. When the little alarm goes off I look at the phone and there's some Arabic word on the screen telling me what to do if I could read it. For all I know it could be telling me to "attack the infidels."

Hey, if the Catholics or Presbyterians would just invent a phone app of their own for prayer I wouldn’t have to do these things.

This presented a bit of a problem: How to explain why my Presbyterian little self was praying according to Muslim prayer habits. In today’s political climate this is what I call a no bueno. Bad idea.

I also discovered another tiny problem. I realized I had spent over a month in a quest to find a way to alert me when to pray but I had not so far done any actual praying. I got so caught up in researching recipes for the icing that I forgot to bake the cake.

Then I thought of another trick that seemed to solve both problems. I could use hot flashes to alert me. I’ve been getting them regularly since I started taking medication for breast cancer. Say what you want about hot flashes but they don’t make a noise. I am the only one who knows “my internal alarm” has gone off. So far I’ve even managed to avoid fanning myself with the church bulletin or any other handy piece of paper and no one even knows they’re happening. I normally get about four or five a day and they started to look like a handy accouterment to alert me that it was time to pray. I’m brilliant this way sometimes.

The hot flashes are also a great way to remind me to actually pray, to remember how thankful I am that I have them. They remind me that the cancer was small and weak enough that it’s only been a minor blip in my life; that the only reminder I have of the whole experience is a tiny scar and medicine that provides nothing more inconvenient than a few hot flashes. The hot flashes can remind me that I am alive, I have survived breast cancer, I’ve been marked for a deeper relationship with God. Maybe I have an important assignment ahead. Maybe it’s dramatic or maybe it’s not. Maybe it's just an assignment to “Be.” Be loved and Be loving. Be-ing with the Creator of the Universe.

I was on a roll here. Could there be other reminders as close at hand as my own body? Then it came to me: I could pray every time I took a breath.

Like most red blooded Americans, I breathe on a regular basis. I don’t need to set an alarm to remind me. It doesn’t even require batteries. Some breaths are bigger and deeper than others, with some shallow and done without thought. I decided to use those big ones to remind myself to pray.

I remembered the Michael W. Smith song:

This is the air I breathe
This is the air I breathe
Your Holy Presence living in me

I practiced taking great scoops of air and noticing how much empty space there is between my nostrils and my lungs. Compared to how crowded my torso gets with heart, liver and kidneys all bunched up together, there appears to be an enormous empty cavity in my head. Especially at the roof of my mouth going up to my sinuses, bouncing off the back of my throat and careening down to my lungs. In the scheme of my body it is almost Grand Canyon-like cavernous. You could store large objects there if it wouldn’t obstruct the flow of air and strangle you. How do you measure air? There’s room for lots and lots of it in these empty spaces.

I started imagining how big God is and how much God I take in with every breath. I’m a fairly smallish person; I don’t have big lungs but I could still take in a huge breath and think of that capacity as a temporary residence for God. Inhale God. Exhale God. Upon exhale, making room for another scoop of fresh God. Over and over. And over and over. Not “hyper-ventilating” over and over. “Eternal” over and over. Well, “eternal” as long as the breathing lasts, as long as my physical body works. Until the last breath I take.

Then, when my last breath is spent, God will have no more use for this temporary home. And God will move on. Leaving the empty shell for my children to dispose of in a hopefully respectful way.

Where will God go? Only God knows. In the meantime I celebrate my Roommate. My very large, revitalizing, refreshing, powerful and empowering, reassuring Roommate.

This is the air I breathe.

Closer But Farther

2011-03-16T07:43:00.004-06:00

OK, I was planning to tell you how I ended up with an app on my phone that would alert me to all the Muslim prayer times. I figure I’m on the ‘No Fly’ list already from all the Cuban cigars I’ve brought home from Guatemala so I couldn’t get into any more trouble than I already am. I’ll tell you all about it next week when I have time to get the words lined up in the right order. It’s a thoughtful topic and I haven’t had time to think this week. The girls are here for Spring Break.

I have a better topic anyway. Sonia Gonzales suggested it to me when I posted the following picture on my facebook:

This is a picture of my granddaughters playing with each other.

They are eleven and nine years old. They know as much about the internet as I do. In fact, they are teaching me some things about Powerpoint that I didn’t know. In this picture they are playing a game they found on a website called Club Penguin. For this game each girl logs on and instead of surfing individually they play against each other. Each girl’s penguin runs around the map finding other friends who are known only special names like “Crazy Girl 7” or “Blue Sky Girl”. Some of these characters are total strangers but some of them they know at school.

I’ve asked all the right questions and they gave me all the right answers that make me feel they’re not going to end up meeting perverts posing as pre-teens and arranging to meet them at the corner ice cream shop.

But what this kind of game amounts to is that they each are on a laptop in the same room playing with each other. They could do this in separate rooms, even separate cities if they wanted to, but they enjoy sitting about six inches from each other.

As anti-social as this sounds, they would really prefer playing Monoply with me at our kitchen table. But, please dear God, I am not a board game grandmother. Their father or any of their Ohio relatives do boardgames. Sadly, the Elses do not. I don’t worry much about them becoming sociopaths because what the Elses do is build great bonfires and sit outside talking to each other. In fact, we are great talkers and communicators.

As of Wednesday morning we have had the television on sparsely and mostly on CNN watching news of Japan and the earthquake/tsumani/nuclear fires. Most of our time has been outdoors fishing or clearing brush. Sarah invented a new fireside dessert called S’moreos. We watched the septic tank get pumped out and re-built. Then we cleared more brush and cut down a couple of trees. We watched about a hundred vultures gather at dusk to spend the night in our woods.We lay on our backs on the fishing pier and watched the moon playing hide and seek with the clouds. The girls even caught a couple of fish. So, my granddaughters haven’t spent all their time on the computer.

But I understand Sonia’s point that we should put more thought into how our grandchildren spend their time. And kids aren’t doing this any more than adults. Our human interaction is changing. We text more than talk on the phone. We watch TV instead of reading books. I can’t tell you the last time I’ve called a friend and talked on the phone. Most of our human interaction is done by email if it’s not possible to do in person.

My grandmother’s generation visited each other in their homes. They sat in rocking chairs on the front porch after dinner every evening and people passing by on foot were invited to come sit a spell and talk. My generation talked on the phone for hours instead. My granddaughters are now playing games with people they have never even met. We are slowly moving farther and farther away from each other.

But I have to defend this new social tool because without it, Sonia Gonzales wouldn’t be able to e-mail me and suggest I write about it on my blog. Without Google translator I wouldn’t even know what she was saying. And we couldn’t see recent photos of each other’s grandkids so I could ask her about them over coffee when I visit Guatemala in October. If we are careful we can bring ourselves back to the table to sit face to face. But we will have to exert some effort to do it. In my case, it will require an airplane flight in the face of rising fuel prices.

The computer age has brought both good and bad. We just have to be vigilant; we will have to constantly consider the ways it has changed our lives, embrace the good and avoid the bad.

Gracias para tema, hermana.

Chilling With the Sisters on a Saturday Night

2011-03-08T21:49:00.008-06:00

A continuation of last week’s post on my visit to the St Scholastica Monastery in Fort Smith, Arkansas…….

I don’t have any pictures to show today. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself by taking pictures of people. It didn’t seem very spiritual.

I arranged to stay the night after the retreat since I had a long drive home. There was only one other person who was staying the night, a young woman named Cari Kaufman. I was settling in for the night when I had a knock on my door. Cari said the sisters were about to start watching a video and did I want to join them? I was feeling mellow and could have stayed in my room and gone to bed early but I thought to myself, how many times will I ever get invited by a bunch of nuns to watch a movie with them in their private quarters?

And it was so much more than just a movie. I had a tour of the sister’s personal space in ways I never expected.

I had read just enough of the Rules of Benedict to know that hospitality is a big deal to them. So, in a way, they invited us because they were supposed to and I really wasn’t surprised at the invitation. But they also made me feel like they were very excited to share what they had with me. The sisters are innocent in small ways that tell you they’ve probably never had a pedicure at the mall. And how many women do I know who have never had a pedicure?

We stopped by Macrina’s room since neither Cari nor I knew where the nun’s housing was. I found out the room on the third floor by my own room, what I thought was Macrina’s bedroom (since it had a name plate with “Macrina Wierdekehr, OSB”), was actually an office. She had a desk and a whole array of electronics indicating she is plugged in and as modern as anyone.

Scotch-taped over her desk was a scrap of paper: “I aspire/ to inspire/ before I expire.”

She led us down the stairs and through more 12-foot wide halls and into the opposite section of the building. Cari was about as lost as I was; what made it so bad was the fact that everything in the building was the same. Each wing of each floor was identical: there was a large common area with inviting chairs, easy chairs, rockers and couches from an assortment of styles and times. I’m not sure if things were donated to them or they bought things sporadically. But, even though comfortable, nothing matched. Each area offered a tiny kitchen and communal bathroom. The sisters' private rooms were the same size as the one I was spending the weekend in: about 10 feet by 20 feet. The bathroom was identical to the one on our floor: A row of showers, a row of toilets and a row of sinks with mirrors. You could tell they were settled in because there were bottles of shampoo and tubes of toothpaste sitting out just like at home. The shower was going when we walked past.

Their common room was pretty much like the lounge on my floor: two couches and an assortment of chairs. A couple of bookcases. Their kitchen was maybe slightly larger than the one I have a picture in last week’s blog.

Sister Macrina got Cari and I settled on the couch then went off to do something. We already knew from spending the day with Macrina that she was one of those people who spends a lot of time darting hither and yon. We sat on one of the couches talking to one of the sisters. One by one, the sisters came in the common room to settle around the TV. Someone put in the movie video and turned the TV on then hit “pause.”

The monastery has a Netflix subscription and they love watching movies that are, as Macrina describes them, “a cut above Hollywood.” I took that to mean with a little more meat on their bones if not the culturally popular shows. This one was a biography of Dr Ben Carson, one of the pioneers in neurosurgery who was also black. It was a classic story of triumph over adversity.

I knew most of the sisters from seeing them at dinner and lunch. There was Magdalene who had welcomed me and took me all over the place when I first arrived. One sister looked like a thin version of myself. A couple of the sisters were in their PJs. The evening had a Slumber Party feel.

The sisters started settling in and fluttering around wondering where the pizza they’d ordered was. However, there was something different in the way they wondered aloud about the pizza, there was an air of innocence more than complaint. It was not so much “Where’s the damned pizza? We ordered it an hour ago,” like I would have asked. It was more of a concern that the delivery guy might have gotten lost or had car trouble. I heard a telephone ring and saw that they had something my section of the building lacked—a wall phone. The delivery guy was calling to ask which of the six front doors to the imposing compound he should go to. Something told me these ladies didn’t order pizza very often and that I hadn’t been the only one intimidated by the enormity of the place.

Once the pizza arrived they commenced to flutter about drinks. One sister casually asked if there was any beer. Another sister went to look for it and found a small one, a “pony” she called out. These chicks may not have ever had a pedicure but they knew their beer sizes.

Then they fluttered around with their seating to make sure everyone could see. Again, they arranged themselves with a manner radiating concern for each other’s welfare. Sister Macrina arrived but then they noticed another sister was missing. Trying to get all the sisters settled in was starting to look like assembling a bunch of schoolgirls. Waiting for her, they cued up the movie and were delighted to find they had option to have captions.

As they settled in, each one had a prayer shawl either around their shoulders or over their legs. The weather that night in northern Arkansas was cold and the inside of the building was always about two degrees below “refreshing.” The sisters just wrapped themselves in shawls. Shawls were everywhere that evening as we watched TV. I realized there were probably thousands of Catholic women all over the country knitting their little hearts out for these nuns. Shawls and canes seemed to be ubiquitous and interchangeable here. Taking a vow of poverty meant that nothing belonged to any one woman and things were always available to anyone who needed it. Ownership wasn’t part of their lifestyle. Yet they cared for everything they touched as though it had value beyond measure.

The movie wasn’t a Hollywood blockbuster. It was a forgettable biography made for TV. At one point in the show a child died and they all mourned the death like it was their own family. At another emotional point there were sniffles around the room. These women without children regarded every child as though it was their own.

The next morning I packed up and was on my way. I could tell my life had been changed in a small way that is hard to put into words. Life looked softer somehow. I had time alone in a way I’d never had before. I would repeat the weekend in a heartbeat.

Next week: How I became an unofficial Muslim

Enough

2011-03-01T16:12:00.015-06:00

It was a little bit like stepping into a time capsule.

Only a month after the retreat on the ancient spiritual practices, I was on my way to a monastery. I have started signing my email, "Retreats R Us” because this one was my third in a month and I still have one more to go to.

I signed up for this one a long time ago when I started following one of my favorite writers on her blog. Macrina Wiederkehr is a monk who has written several books on contemplation and reflection. And, yes, you can be a female monk. According to Sister Macrina, you don’t have to be a man to be a monk. All you need is a monastery. I won’t bore you with more details than that, especially since Latin is involved and, mostly because I don’t understand any of it. I just know Sister Macrina called herself a monk. And I know for a fact that she lives in a monastery because the sign on the building says so.

On my drive to Fort Smith, Arkansas to the St Scholastica Monastery, my imagination kept picturing ancient stone walls. It turned out to be a whole compound of about three huge buildings with a 1950’s look. The monastery was across the street from a brand new mall but, thankfully, had enough trees as a buffer zone that once inside the walls you never thought about the mall. Everything inside has been so well-maintained that it looked brand new. It was like stepping into a time-warp.

But not the time warp of the middle ages. More like 1955. My accommodations were almost an exact replica of my college dorm but with carpet instead of linoleum. The buildings were connected by wide halls with windows on each side. They kept an array of potted plants in the sunlight of the halls. Anytime they could use natural lighting instead of electrical they took advantage of it.

I wasn’t sure which of the six doors to approach since I couldn’t see lights on in any window. As I was walking up to one door, another door opened and a woman called out to me. She turned out to be Sister Magdalen. She got me registered and took me to evening prayer since it was time, then finally to my room. All of this was done walking with a tired but energetic limp and much huffing and puffing. She mentioned losing her cane.

When I saw her later with a cane I congratulated her on finding it. Oh, no, she admitted, she had not found it, merely “swiped” one she found laying around. Later, I saw for myself the occasional odd wheelchair left here or there, sitting in the hall, forgotten by a sister who decided to walk and left the chair abandoned. This is only one of the signs that the church is aging. Several of the sisters were on walkers. It was almost like visiting an old folks home. Of the about 20 or 30 nuns occupying the monastery only a handful were under 40.

When Sister Magdalen showed me my room I fell in love with it. It was comfortable; no more, no less. I had enough to keep me comfortable but not enough to distract me.

My room reminded me of every dorm room in every college except this dorm didn’t foam at the mouth every time you wanted to light a candle. In fact, they offered a healthy dose of unattended candles everywhere I looked. Almost evey nook and cranny had candles mostly because there were tiny chapels tucked away everywhere and each one had a candle burning.

The room had two twin beds, a reading chair and a small desk and chair. There was a clock that was unplugged and I didn’t plug it in. I figured if the whole purpose of the retreat was to get in tune to God then I would transfer over to “God’s time.” Both evenings I went to bed around 9 pm and woke the new morning around 7 or so.

Of course, the sleeping accommodations weren’t the reason to come to this place. Each floor had two sections and each section had a lounge with about four different arrangements of chairs or couches that invited conversation or reading. By every sitting arrangement sat a table and a basket of books. The area had a little sign that announced this was the “Merton Lounge” and I found several books on the life of Thomas Merton. I don’t know much about him but I’ve heard of him before many times. Just about every clergy person I love eventually ends up quoting Thomas Merton. I found a book on the Quakers and several brightly illustrated children’s books with the playful adult in mind. I could have spent the entire weekend in the lounge just reading the books they had sitting around.

This led me to my biggest problem: There were too many things to read. Should I read Sister Macrina’s books before we started the retreat so that I was well-prepared? Or should I read the books in the lounge that I wouldn’t have access to once I went home? It's the devil to have Attention Deficit Disorder like I do but sometimes it comes in handy-- to be able to read four books at once, easily shifting my attention from one book to another. I sometimes end up having a “theme read.” I’ll start out with a book, fall in love with the subject and get three other books on the subject and read bits and pieces from the various books flitting from book to book like a bee gathering honey. It feels more comfortable for me to do this than if I read each book straight through. So that’s what I did with the Merton books. He was a cool guy. Now I want to know more about him. Thank you, Amazing God, for inventing the internet.

The desk in my room was straight from the 50’s, made out of the same wood and metal as the desks I remember from elementary school . Except they were in new condition. They had been so well maintained they hadn’t aged a bit.

Even the microwave oven in one of the kitchens looked like it had just been taken out of the box it came in thirty-five years ago.

The next morning I went into the kitchen and found coffee brewing. I took my time picking out the perfect coffee cup, and used it exclusively the whole weekend.

I found the universal cereal of retreats, Raisin Bran, and milk in the tiny kichen. I should eat so simply every day.

By 9 a.m. we gathered in one of the conference rooms. There were 22 of us sitting in a circle. After introductions of people who mostly lived nearby I realized I was the only Protestant in the room and the only one to drive six hours to get there. It was a “Protestant Friendly” group and much easier than I thought it would be. Macrina didn’t even open with a prayer so there was no crossing, no kneeling or genuflecting. Later on, I bought a CD of music she used and saw that ITunes labeled it “new age.” I always find it hilarious when these ancient spiritual practices, some even dating back to before Christ, are considered “new” age. At one end was a low table with a cross, a bible, a candle and some bells.

Sister Macrina introduced herself as ADHD with the “H” accented. She apologized in advance for any mental field trips she might take in her talks. Sometimes she brought us back to the topic but more often we didn’t really care because the distant field she led us into was a better one. One time she started to launch into a corollary subject but stopped herself and said she needed to pray about it first. She has a new book called "Abide" and it was due to the publishers on Monday so she was distracted a bit more than usual.

The retreat was billed as “A Day of Recollection.” She gathered us together for about three sessions that lasted an hour each. She had two bells, as she called them, but they looked more like cymbals to me except they were small and of thick metal. She could hit one against the other and produce a singularly pure sound that reverberated through the room. As she led us into prayer she would ring these three times and we could hear the vibrations of the sound bouncing off our bodies. She ended each session with the bells and then sent us off to be silent and reflect. Once I went into my room because it was still cold outside. Once I visited the labyrinth outside. The last time I visited the gift shop to buy copies of her books. And there was one time she kept us in the room there with her and led us into about ten minutes of silence there in the room. I could hear my head turn on my neck, my breath inhaling and exhaling. She showed us how to place our hand over our heart and feel our heart beat.

When Sister Macrina drew the last session to an end she suggested we sit there in our circle but cross our hands over our chests, bow to our fellow retreatants and bid each other, "May the Spirit of God Who dwells in me greet the Spirit Who dwells in you." The woman next to me murmered, "Namaste."

When Macrina was explaining her ADHD she talked a little about Temple Grandin’s talent for understanding animals and how being closed in the cattle chute calmed her. The restrictive atmosphere of the monastery was helpful to me in keeping me on track of what I was there for. For a person who loves to explore every distraction the simplicity of the monastery was helpful.

While I enjoyed the option to read several books at once, to spend my free time any way I wanted, I also enjoyed the restrictions the retreat gave me. There was no TV or laptop, no revolving refrigerator door or array of food. I had what I needed and no more. I had enough.

The majority of the modern world is suffering from a famine caused by excess. We have too much food, too many clothes, electronics, cars and way too many choices. It was only when I had no more choices of food that I noticed I my stomach was full. I had taken one change of clothes and it was delightfully easy to dress in the morning. When I had only an apple for a bedtime snack I was healthier than at home with a refrigerator full of junk. It was only when I limited myself that I felt free.

Next week: Chilling with the Sisters on a Saturday night.

Our God is an Awesome God

2011-02-22T12:00:00.004-06:00

This is one of those times when words are not adequate. In fact, we risk the very real possibility today that my words will only get in the way. So I will be brief.

The First Presbyterian Garland women had our annual retreat last weekend. There really aren't many funny stories to tell except when Margaret ran her canoe, including her passenger, into a tree. Or when Jamye claimed one of our Christian sisters was a “butt” and someone broke out singing, “They’ll Know We are Christians by Our Love.” There were plenty of laughs and love to go around.

I think this was the busiest retreat ever with more activities than you could take part in. We had nature walks, morning prayer by the lake, evening Taize by the fireside, S’mores and a campfire singalong. We had talks on prayer and/or mission trips. You could learn yoga and Zumba. You could get a massage or a facial or both. In between we had a great speaker and great food.

The retreat was also marked by what was not there. Among the sisters who should have been with us were two friends who couldn’t make it for very sobering reasons. Renee’s husband was in the hospital and his cancer was only sounding worse. We could only imagine how hard this is when you've got teenaged kids. And Sister Debbie was still out of commission since she was quite literally, and in the most horrible way possible, run over by a truck. I can’t remember a retreat without either of these ladies and even though we know they will be with us next year, it was not the same without them. On the bright side, I also heard from Sandy that her son, who we all watched grow up, is now able to wear prosthetic legs after he lost them both in Iraq.

Sometimes life is not all fun and games. How do humans operate with the hardness of life playing as background music all the time? I think you just pray your guts out, love each other and enjoy whatever good life sends you. Christianity is the only religion in the world to experience the exhilaration of an empty tomb, who focus on what joy is possible when you have faith..

Now for the good part: We had the best music ever. And I’ve got video to prove it. And this is only the stuff I recorded. There were another couple of bands and singers I didn’t get on camera. Plus, we never even got to hear Sue Ellen play the dulcimer. That's a good reason to start planning next year's retreat now.

We had classical music:

The Greatly Modified Angel Band with Kat's sister filling in for Debbie and Shirley

And as a Grand Finale, Bobbie Snider. We ended with Kirk Franklin and his church singing Our God is an Awesome God. I didn't get any video because I was too busy dancing. Gracias Senor.

Flat and Emerging

2011-02-11T11:29:00.008-06:00

I think I may be starting to understand the new Flat World. Lord knows I’ve read a boat-load of books lately on the way the world is changing, from the Emerging Church tomes to Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat. I had begun to suspect that reading so many books on the subject would only confuse me. But yesterday it hit me upside the head and became crystal clear.

To start with, we had rain, sleet, snow and, finally, sub freezing temperatures. There was nothing to do outdoors and the house was about as clean as I was going to get it. I barely left my easy chair and spent time sitting in front of the television and reading one or another of the books I have bought on the subject of the latest re-formation of the Christian Church.

Their theory is that every 500 years or so the Christian Church re-forms itself. Our last reformation was around 1500 so we’re due for another re-arranging of the way we do things. The term for this one is “Emerging” and I found myself thinking in hushed , almost embarrassed whispers, “Oh, my, I think I’m emerging!” The old way the church operates may be on the way out.

So here I was: homebound and emerging all at the same time. I started surfing the internet. And since I had an abundance of time I decided to try out some of the new stuff on the internet I had not had the opportunity to explore, including Twitter.

While I surfed, CNN sifted through the situation in Egypt. They’ve been looking for one solitary leader they could focus on. It makes things so much easier, dontcha know, if they can just interview one person and get the whole story instead of sprinting around and crouching between parked cars or around corners to whisper what’s happening in the streets.

Yesterday they seemed to have found a leader and I think everyone was relieved. One guy who could explain what was happening, who would admit the demonstrations were planned and who was willing to speak plainly and in English. Who claimed he was willing to die for this cause even though he has a wife and family he loves.

That guy was Wael Ghonim. He is a 31 year old executive at Google who was arrested briefly and let go. Young but not wild-eyed. My interest perked. This might make it easy to give a damn. I could relate to this guy. He wasn’t one of those religious fanatics. He spoke not only in English but even sprinkled around few americanisms, using the term: “gonna” a couple of times. He was easy on the eyes and ears. I could listen to this guy.

The way he described it, their desires were pure, simple and shared by all humanity. They just wanted a voice in how their lives were organized. They just wanted what all of us want: food on the table, decent schools and regular trash pickup.

I wanted to know more about this guy. So I Googled him. Then I discovered he was on facebook. Well, you might just as well have told me he lived on my street. I spend a lot of time on facebook. I looked the guy up and found him. Then my fingers sat poised over the enter button. Should I friend him?

Could the world have actually become that small and that efficient that I could gain access to someone in Egypt with the press of a key on my laptop? Was it that easy to gain access with someone in the dead middle of a revolution? It was a little like crossing the Delaware with Washington but wearing a warmer coat.

But did I really want to enter this relationship? This would put me on record as connected to a guy living in a dangerous part of the world, who the bad people wanted to get rid of. Theoretically, dangerous people could find me if I connected with this guy. I knew this was a really far-fetched idea. I’m certainly not an international person of any interest to anyone. But I knew it was technically possible to find me if anyone wanted to badly enough. What exactly was the risk to my safety or reputation if I claimed any kind of relationship with Wael Ghonim?

Curiosity beat out fear and I finally hit the enter button. The computer told me he already had too many friends and didn’t have room for another. I was a little relieved, to be honest.

At that moment it all came together for me.

Now I knew for sure that this was the guy the TV was talking about. And I realized how close I had come to having access to his message in a very personal way. I could even imagine him sitting in his living room setting up his facebook himself while his wife cooked dinner in the kitchen and his kids played at his feet. Not really so different from me sitting here in my own living room. The only thing limiting my relationship with Wael Ghonim was the limit of technology, the number of friends facebook can handle. And we all know those limits can be worked out. The middle man of television reporters was eliminated. I could now get my news directly from the source.

The world got much flatter for me and everyone else.

So I started watching the live stream from Al Jazeera TV in the middle-East. Talk about getting your news from the source. At this point I’m sure some of my conservative friends are upset with me for maybe being a tool of brainwashing. I doubt they have watched the reports by Al Jazeera. In the interest of fairness, I tuned into Fox briefly and found it to be more than a bit alarmistic. The word “Alert!” kept scrolling across the screen like there were hoards of swarthy militia clenching knives between their teeth and crawling on their bellies across the White House lawn. They warned me of an Islamic terrorist state even though CNN has shown people live on camera saying very calmly that this is not a religion-based movement. This is a movement toward Democracy.

You know what I’m starting to think? I’m starting to think people are just getting tired of religion. I think the more involved folks get in their religious beliefs the more they gussie it up to prove how important it is to them. They come up with lots of rules and regulations then find words in their scripture to back up their positions, even while there are just as many scripture words that say the opposite. God is clever that way. We have to pick what we believe. And I think people are getting tired of using religion to stir the pot. In the words of that great American philosopher, Rodney King, “Why can’t we all just get along?”

The world changes quickly now. And the rate at which it changes is getting faster. In just the last 15 minutes, as I was writing these words, Mubarak resigned and the whole country of Egypt started celebrating. CNN was able to find my friend Wael and talk to him. And Wael said he credits facebook with the successful resolution of this whole scenario. I rest my case.

Everyone on earth can have the same information at the same time. The world is flat. And a new way to live is emerging. Someday Wael Ghonim will be my friend.

Weather Issues

2011-02-09T07:36:00.002-06:00

I’m finding it very hard to settle down to line the words up tonight. We’ve got Guatemala fever here and it’s very distracting. We’re thinking of taking two weeks of language school and joining the annual church trip for a third week to practice. We’re trying to get another joint study together. This would be a week of bilingual bible study and just an awesome way to pick up the language. Beaven’s already figured out that the trip wouldn’t cost us all that much. We would almost save money going to Guatemala just by keeping me out of Walmart.

Once we’ve done the math I’m usually set for the trip. Beaven has gone into deep research and won’t come out until we get off the plane. He’s got three guide books on his lap right now. We think we have the language school picked out but he’ll surf the internet for a couple more weeks until he’s read about each of the approximately 187 schools in Antigua alone and decided to go with the one we picked out tonight. I’ve finally learned to pace myself in this marriage.

In other news, it was a beautiful day today and I played outdoors as much as I could because the weather is supposed to get bad again tonight. I hope I have enough food.

We had about four days last week when the weather broke records for deep snow and low temperatures. The schools were closed and the roads deserted. Four days within which people not only never left their house but also ate their own cooking instead of going to MacDonald’s. After four days everyone had eaten the contents of their refrigerators right down to the last bit of moldy cheese and shriveled celery.

Then the temperatures rose, the ice melted and we all emerged cautiously to grab the car keys and head to the store.

I have never seen the stores so crowded. It was like Christmas shopping on steroids. Inside, the milk shelf was bare. My daughter had to go to three stores to find eggs. Then, before the checkout ladies could catch their breath, the Super bowl arrived and cleaned them out of chips and salsa.

The bad weather also flushed out wild animals looking for any warm place to stay. Last week we had a visitor in our huge metal storage building that we call the barn. We have a lot of junk that we can’t bear to throw away but don’t want to live with. So we have a storage building that is actually bigger than our house. You can’t imagine the array of boxes and accoutrements we have piled in there. I think when Beaven croaks I might open a hardware store just by offering all his stuff for sale. I could make a tidy bundle and wouldn’t even have to acquire an inventory. It’s all right here. He has a classic Ford tractor that sits in pieces waiting for him to rebuild it. A couple of riding mowers. A tree mulcher and a leaf sweeper. A welding rig. I could go on but I don’t know the names of the other things. Except that I know half of the stuff either doesn’t work or Beaven doesn’t want to use them.

Anyway, back to the critter in the barn. It must have been big because he knocked a bunch of heavy things off the shelves. I want to set a trap out to catch him. (Incidentally, we already have a live trap so it wouldn’t be that hard to do. It’s on the shelf next to the box of spare parts for the disposal in a house we owned two houses ago.) But I would have to figure out how to set the trap. And then deal with whatever we caught. And since I can barely deal with catching a catfish that might be problematic.

I have a sad suspicion that it might be a possum. And those are just about the nastiest and ugliest creatures God ever made. I know. I washed one in my washing machine once.

Obviously, it was entirely by accident. The critter probably jumped into the machine and I must have thrown clothes on top of him and started the machine without knowing it was there. God is merciful that way sometimes. The next morning when I went to move the clothes over to the dryer I opened the lid and was met by a horrible odor. When I looked inside I saw what I perceived to be either a huge rat or an incredibly ugly cat. Naturally, I slammed the lid shut and left the mess for Beaven to deal with. I think I wrote him some sweet note about how much I loved him and would he be my hero yet once again. I probably drew some happy faces on the note and left for work.

He called me later to tell me he had dispatched the possum off to possum heaven but I would want to re-wash the clothes a few hundred times. Was he all mangled, I asked. No, Beaven said. Just Real Clean.

Getting Peaceful

2011-02-02T07:34:00.003-06:00

We were snowed in yesterday and this made for a quiet, if boring, day. The taste of warm weather just a few days before convinced Beaven and I that spring was just around the corner so we spent some time outside on Saturday clearing brush around our creek. I finished radiation treatments on Friday and was happy to be back to normal life. It felt good to run the chainsaw again, to pull tree limbs out of tangled vines. Never have sore muscles felt as good as when I got out of bed the next morning. It felt like an honest tiredness.

But yesterday we were confined to the indoors. We spent our time watching the cat watch birds at the bird feeders. He was all but drooling around the whiskers wishing he could get his paws on one of those fluttery things. He watched them through the window for a while then went outside to watch where he at least had a chance to grab one. Then he came inside and ran around the house for about ten minutes. It’s good that at least someone gets some exercise around here.

I’m all about being peaceful now. A couple of weeks ago I went to a retreat to learn how to get peaceful so I feel quite the authority. Almost every year my New Year’s resolution is something about getting peaceful if it kills me. As I age and slow down physically I realize I’m going to have to figure out how to be successfully sedentary if I want to stay sane.

One of the first things we found out at the retreat was that our meals would be eaten without talking to each other. I wasn’t so sure I would be able to handle it. Everyone knows what a talker I am. Breakfast was to be silent. We would get our food from the dinner line and take it to an upstairs room where all 16 of us sat and ate without speaking.

This idea came from the retreat leaders, our pastor and her husband. Anne and David had recently spent a week at a monastery in New Mexico where meals were spent in silence.

A couple of people who know me joked about whether I could do this and it really wasn’t a joke to me. I really did wonder how being silent would make me feel. Just the thought of it made me anxious. I prayed and journaled about it. To my surprise I woke the next morning feeling rejuvenated. I couldn’t wait to get to breakfast and try this new technique. Yes, I manage to do it. And I felt good doing it.

Lunch was eaten again without talking but with some scripture read to us while we ate. For our evening meal we had Vivaldi’s Four Seasons playing in the background. The music was fairly peppy and we found ourselves eating in time to the music, in other words, fast. We finished in silence alright but also in record time. Apparently, talking can slow you down sometimes.

Oh, and the tomahawk throwing….. the retreat was billed as “Spiritual Practices.” David wanted to demonstrate the concept that you have to practice something to get better at it. Lord knows where he came up with the idea of throwing a tomahawk but he found stuff about that art on the internet and bought three of the things. So, we all lined up outside and started throwing hatchets around.

Bet you never did that at church camp, did you?

The retreat was a wonderful mix of learning new things and spending some time being quiet. We had time in the middle of the second day to just sit around and do whatever we wanted. For the couple of pastors with us it may have been a rare experience to have free time. We set up two tables full of books we could read in our spare time. Some people put together a jigsaw puzzle at odd moments of the day and late into the evening. I took a short nap.

So, now that I’ve been formally trained in how to be peaceful I just knew I could put all that to work on a day when snow and ice shut down the world outside my window. Not a chance. Neither one of us knew what to do with ourselves. Beaven had the police scanner going all day listening to calls for wreckers. One sheriff reported being hit by another car when it spun out of control. I did not find peace in being cooped up against my will; with our constant monitoring of CNN and Egypt’s unrest. There was no peace to be found there. Nor did I found it in the television pictures of icy roads around the nation.

I only found peace when I went to bed before Beaven, shut the bedroom door and spent time alone and listening in silence.

I can attest to this: that after living out here in the country with only the most nominal of neighbors, I have gained a new appreciation of silence. The book table at the retreat had a lot of books on silence. And I read them at this point in my life not for clues on how to find and embrace silence but as affirmation of its value.

Silence in the midst of other people at the retreat felt new and strange but it wasn’t nearly as hard as I feared it would be. I could probably learn to be good at it with some practice. But I do know that I’m already pretty good at silence when I am alone. I find peace best when the world is quiet, when I leave room for God to speak.

I gained no insights or revelations last night. Only the reassurance that God is there waiting, always waiting, for me to listen.

Parties With Children

2011-01-26T07:33:00.001-06:00

I really intended to write today about my weekend at a retreat on the Ancient Spiritual Practices. But these words here lined up faster that the other ones. I’ll try to corral the others by next week because I’m sure you’ll want to know all about throwing the tomahawk.

I went to an absolutely stupendous party last night. I was already in town doing flu duty for Sarah so it worked out just fine for me to run by the restaurant when Emily got home from work. It was a surprise party for one of our seminary graduates who apparently is more beloved than I ever gave her credit for. When Dana told me she had reserved a room for 40 people I never dreamed that 40 people would actually show up. I also never dreamed we could pull off that big of a surprise but we did. Traci suffered the indignities of wearing the crown that announced she is now 50 years old and then stood for the Happy Birthday song. I think she even got to eat, though I have no idea when she managed to do it because there were so many folks for her to talk to.

If the 40 people who were there to celebrate are a realistic sample of our church congregation then we are in good shape. The people gathered were all different ages and length of membership in the First Presbyterian Church of Garland. While our President was reporting on the state of the union to the country I experienced firsthand the state of my church congregation. And it is probably in better shape than the country.

Of the 40 people we had several who made an extra effort to be there. And I’m not even counting Kit who came all the way from an island in the British West Indies where she lives part of the year with her new husband. She didn’t really come for Traci’s birthday. She was already in town because her ex-husband died and she came to be with their kids at the funeral. He had only been a member of our church a couple of years before they divorced so very few of the folks at dinner knew the guy. He was more than a bit curmudgeonly. Some might use the word “sour.” Hence the divorce. I could say more but the guy’s dead so I have to cut him some slack.

As the dinner proceeded we passed around the newest member, A. J. who is less than a year old. We compared length of marriages and Arlis and Betty won at 56 years. Across the room from them sat a couple who celebrated their first anniversary a couple of days ago. We had three generations of the Dunlap family. Three generations of McFarlands. We started telling stories that got better and better as the meal progressed.

One of our best stories involved Kit’s newly dead ex-husband, the curmudgeon. I love to recount this story with my old friend Linda and she happened to be sitting right there next to me at dinner so it was kind of like an obligation to share it with the others.

Beaven and I sponsored the acolytes of the church that year. It must have been a good 30 years ago. At the end of the year the sponsors were expected to throw a big party for the kids and preferably one that involved swimming. Somebody suggested that we take the kids to Lake Lavon. So we recruited some adult sponsors and as I remember this wasn’t hard. We had almost as many adults as kids.

As Linda and I told the story we filled the facts for each other: There were about five or six cars in a caravan to the lake. The first car detoured by a store and bought a bottle of wine. A couple more cars did the same. The way I remember the story, Linda and I stopped for a bottle too since everybody else did. She argued with me that we didn’t stop. But I say we stopped. I don’t know why this was a big detail to her since we would have been huge mooches if we hadn’t bought our own wine that day. Because that was one detail we agreed on: we both had a couple of nips ourselves. But Linda and I have been friends long enough that more than a few details have flown our diminishing memories. And I’m not inclined to hold tightly to facts anyway.

Anyway, the kids swam, roasted hot dogs, and had a great time. Nobody drowned. Everyone went home tired and happy. About a week later, I got a call from our minister asking which adults had gone with us. I thought how sweet he was that he was going to send a Thank You note to all the adult sponsors for helping with the party.

Instead, we each got a scathing letter from the elders of the church chastising us for drinking at a church function. Beaven and I were mortified. We considered dropping out of church in shame. I’m not sure how we ever managed to drag ourselves back to church the next Sunday with our tails between our legs. Then, one by one, others from the party came up to me to whisper out of the side of their mouths and ask if we had gotten “the letter.” Once we knew we had all been scolded equally we developed a sort of secret club: “People who got in Trouble for Drinking at a Church Event.” Presbyterians aren’t usually that stuffy about liquor.

That should have been our first clue but we didn’t catch on for years. After a while, we found out there had been a nasty letter to the church elders--obviously from someone at the party but we had no idea who ratted on us. About five years later we found out it was the recently departed curmudgeon. He was also a former Methodist minister. I guess the Methodists aren’t that big on drinking wine while they’re watching kids swim in a lake.

Church congregations are so much like families. You get an assortment package of kooks and saints, the loud, the proud, the timid and the tenacious. I am one of the tenacious ones. We have a lot of those in my church.

I looked around the table last night and fell in love with my church family all over again. This is how a church family is different from a biological one: each of us is there by choice. We can leave anytime we choose. Nobody had to come wish Traci a Happy Birthday. We weren’t obligated by Hallmark to feel a certain way. Instead we took our sin-filled sorry selves to the Olive Garden. We sang Happy Birthday then when the food arrived we sang the Doxology. We bragged and commiserated about our kids. We told stories. We laughed and loved each other.

And, yes... some……well, many of the people there had wine with their dinner. Yes, children were in attendance but nobody was swimming.

Martin Luther King Day

2011-01-18T20:09:00.003-06:00

Sarah came out and stayed with us Monday while school was out for the holiday. I asked her what she knew about Martin Luther King. Her distant response made it sound like the poor guy has already been reduced to the corner of history where Abraham Lincoln and George Washington live. A hero, for sure, but a distant hero.

That’s such a sad waste of memories. We are at the time in history right now when the first-hand witnesses to the Civil Rights movement of the 60’s are aging. The grandparents and great grandparents who marched are the ones who can best tell the story. But the sixties happened fifty years ago. Today’s young parents did not witness the struggle. It will do Sarah no good to hear stories from them. They are too young.

It won’t do any good to hear stories from books, they are too dry. It will not do too much good to hear the stories from me. I’m too white.

We’re losing an opportunity. We have limited time for the civil rights veterans to visit elementary schools to tell their stories. And their first-hand stories are so important if we are to understand the full meaning of why we have this holiday.

When our girls were little we lived next to a black couple in a progressively integrating neighborhood. When Beaven tried to worry about this I pointed out our new neighbors were both better educated than us, with two or three graduate degrees between them, including Harvard Law. For a year or two, Carla Ranger and I were stay at home young mothers and found we had a lot in common. Emily was born about a month before her son Marc and we sometimes babysat for each other. We were getting close to being relaxed enough with each other to discuss race when they moved away for better jobs. We made jokes about her leaving the neighborhood instead of my family.

Carla told me of “sitting in” at a restaurant in the sixties. She and a young black man went with a white couple and sat down in a restaurant. That’s all they did. They sat down at a table. Their only crime was to try to buy a meal and eat it in the same room with whites. The owner came to their table and held a gun to Carla’s head and told them to leave his restaurant or he would shoot her.

This story happened. I know the person it happened to. And that’s the closest I ever got to the civil rights movement.

My only brush with the shifting of attitudes was when I was in high school. I went to a weekly Creative Writing class held at the downtown Dallas Public library. The woman who taught the class insisted that it be integrated even though the schools were still segregated at the time. So there were one or two kids in the class who were black. After class one evening I stood at the bus stop talking with Rodney Phillips, a black friend who was part of the class.

We talked while we waited for his bus to take him to “his” part of town and a totally different bus going in a totally different direction to take me to “my” part of town. A white man walked up to us and asked me if that boy was bothering me. I told him no. Years later now, I wish I had had the presence of mind to add that he was a friend. It was my only opportunity to help adjust the mind-set of the sixties and I blew it.

I never marched. I never sang “We Shall Overcome.” I was a witness but not a participant. I risked nothing. I do not get the t-shirt that others earned.

My grandchildren’s attitude toward race is so astonishingly different that I could say they don’t really have an attitude. They don’t have a viewpoint. They have been raised beside children of every race, including bi-racial friends. To them differences in race just don’t exist. I’m not even sure they grasp the concept of race. To them skin color has been relegated to mere identification markers on the level with hair color and height.

My grandmother kept a journal that dates back to the 40’s. It’s a running commentary of what she cooked, how much chicken cost, what the weather was like, what my grandfather planted and other miscellaneous details of their lives. Now, my grandmother was an extremely gracious and genteel woman. She would tell you in a heartbeat that she had never “painted”, which meant used makeup on her face. And that “spirits” had never touched her lips. Ladies did not do those things in her day. But this woman also sprinkled the N word throughout her journal in such a casual way that it’s clear she had no idea that it would be considered hard-core profanity to the little girls who would follow four generations later.

To Grandmother, the word was just a word, while skin color created an un-crossable barrier. To Sarah, skin color is just a color while a certain racial epithet her great-great- grandmother used now announces poor character. Why, you might just as well rouge your cheeks or swill moonshine.

I live within the hinge. Where one solid plank of an old reality meets a totally different plank of the new reality. I have seen both realities, and hold them together and apart at the same time.

In the meantime we still haven’t decided which food best celebrates MLK Day. Thanksgiving has turkey. Easter has ham. Independence Day has hot dogs.

Sarah has voted for ice cream for MLK Day.